All week, we’ll be previewing the shows
by MDC writers that will be featured in the upcoming Kansas City Fringe
Festival, July 16-26. Click here
for a complete schedule of Fringe shows by MDC playwrights (and staff!).
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By Bryan Colley and Tara Varney
Carl Sagan takes you on a voyage to
the Voyager Space Mission and the Golden Record with its message for
extraterrestrial life to discover eons from now. The creators of last year’s
Fringe favorite “Red Death” invite you to the magical dome of Gottlieb
Planetarium where live actors, animation, and outer space collide in a comedic,
informative, and unconventional theatrical event. It was written by Bryan
Colley and Tara Varney, who also directs, and features Coleman Crenshaw as Carl
Sagan.
“Voyage to Voyager is unlike anything I’ve ever written,” Colley
says. “On the one hand, it’s an educational play that will teach you about the
Voyager space mission and its Golden Record full of music and images - exactly
the kind of show you might go to a planetarium to see - but it’s also a comedy
about producing a show at the Fringe. The real story has Carl Sagan hiring some
actors to stage a show about making the record. That way we can look at the
Voyager mission from today’s viewpoint, rather than as a play set in 1977. In
fact, the play exists in the past, present, and future simultaneously, so it’s
not a documentary, but it’s not a conventional drama either. I guess you could
call it a metamentary.
“Because it’s a play about an
object, or rather the music, sounds, and pictures on that object, it was
designed from the start as a multi-media show. That’s a scary thing to do at
Fringe when you have so little tech rehearsal and anything that can go wrong
will go wrong, but being able to produce this at the planetarium has made all
the difference. The venue is perfect, the planetarium director Patrick Hess is
awesome to work with, and we’ve got some terrific little bits of animation to
break up the action on stage. It should be fun.”
Yes, in a Fringe first, Voyage to Voyager will take place inside Union Station’s Arvin Gottlieb
Planetarium (30 West Pershing), at the following
times:
7/17 - Friday - 8:00pm
7/18 - Saturday - 9:30pm
7/19 - Sunday - 6:30pm
7/22 - Wednesday - 8:00pm
7/24 - Friday - 9:30pm
7/25 - Saturday - 8:00pm
