Booneville
1996
Booneville is a collection of narrative sketches and dramatic monologues set in a small Midwestern farm town, written in the summer of 1996. Rather than a single plotted play, these pieces are character studies and slices of small-town life, each told in the warm, wry, first-person voice that runs through so much of Ken Bradbury's writing. They read like material for a one-person show or a revue — short, spoken portraits of the people, humor, and quiet heartbreak of a place that could be anywhere along a country creek.
The town of Booneville is presented as a peculiar ethnic mix in a region otherwise settled by German communities. Where the neighboring towns are "tidy and tight" but not "one bit funny," Booneville is full of fun — a place the narrator grew up assuming was the way of the whole world, only to discover, with some affection and some loss, that it was a "pleasant delusion." The sketches range from broad comedy to genuine tenderness: a boy dragging the world's smallest dead bass seven blocks to have his grandmother take it off the hook; a man who goes to every farm sale but can never bring himself to bid, because each sale is "the end of a life"; and an old woman named Una, rocking on her porch swing, "back and forth and back and forth," whom the narrator simply likes to be with.
Across the pieces, recurring threads emerge — corn detasseling season, the Tilt-O-Whirl at the summer fair, music learned crookedly from the only teachers a small town has to offer, and the long memory of farm families. The collection is by turns funny and elegiac, an affectionate archive of a vanishing rural world.
Sketches
- Bass — A grandmother's visiting grandson drags a tiny, dead bass home from a "piddly little nothin' two-bit stream," and the fish grows in the telling with every passing year.
- Drummy Sutton — A portrait of a man and his open-air, walls-less outdoor privy built high "like a king on his throne," waving at passers-by with a certain air of nobility.
- Farm Sale — A man who attends every farm auction but can never bring himself to bid, because each sale is the end of a family's life on the land.
- Funny — A meditation on Booneville's odd ethnic makeup and on growing up believing everyone's family was full of funny stories.
- Heifer — Roger Smith's tall tale of his city cousin Morris, a double-tree horse hitch, and a "Country Fun Machine" ride on a crazed 4-H heifer.
- Music — How a Booneville upbringing "crippled" a musician: a trumpet held sideways and a piano played with the pinky tucked under, each habit traced back to the only teachers in town.
- Tilt Kiss — A young girl confronts Terry Sweeting over a stolen kiss on the Tilt-O-Whirl that she insists was "planned all summer."
- Una — A quiet, tender address to an aging widow rocking on her porch swing, whose memory comes and goes but whose company is treasured all the same.
Production Notes
These pieces were written in July 1996. The files — including BASS, DRUMMY, FARMSALE, FUNNY, HEIFER, MUSIC, TILTKISS, and UNA — appear to be writing samples or potential performance material drawn from small-town life. No cast list, program, or formal production documentation survives in the archive, suggesting Booneville was a body of monologue writing rather than a fully staged production.