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Who Is Henrietta Hoover and Why Is She Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?

1972 · Chapin Grade School

A rollicking old-fashioned melodrama set in the backwater town of Buzzard's Leg, Tennessee, "Who Is Henrietta Hoover and Why Is She Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?" unfolds sometime between 1900 and the turn of the century. At the heart of the tale is the impoverished Hartfelt family: cantankerous, hard-drinking Charley and his beautiful, long-suffering daughter Charity, who keeps their junk-filled home tidy despite their poverty.

The play opens on Charley waking to a missing pair of boots, a vanished cow named Harriet, and a breakfast of nothing but hoecake — a brisk comic exchange between father and daughter that sets the broad, affectionate tone of the whole evening. Into this hardscrabble world tumble a parade of colorful melodrama types: the upright hero Theodore Trueblood, the hissable villain Simon Sneerliver, the dashing Duke R. Diehard, the local Preacher Sutton, and of course the mysterious title figure, Henrietta Hoover.

Written and directed by Ken Bradbury, the show leans into every cheerful convention of the form — exaggerated heroes and villains, a put-upon heroine, and a chorus of townswomen who double as congregation and gossiping busybodies. A vocal ensemble and a table of card players rounded out the cast, doubling as the congregation when the script called for it.

Production Notes

The production featured a vocal ensemble and a group of card players who also served as congregation members, with the townswomen of Buzzard's Leg filling out the chorus. The role of Henrietta Hoover was credited, in keeping with the show's tongue-in-cheek spirit, to "Herself."

Cast