Singing at Seven
2003 · Sophie Leischin Theatre, Jacksonville Developmental Center
Singing at Seven is a two-act comedy with, in its author's words, "a great deal of painful truth." It unfolds in room B-13 of the Mount Gilead Retirement Facility, the "couples wing," where Paul Leam, a heroic 77 and a retired English teacher who quotes Emily Dickinson by the yard, and Linda Leam, 84 and confined to a wheelchair decorated with plastic flowers, bread ties, and the bumper stickers of every liberal candidate in recent memory, refuse to go quietly. The elderly couple are at odds with the American way of dying, and they fight back with the only weapon they have left — humor. Paul wages a one-man bingo war against the dead and recites Dickinson without his pants; Linda spars with the attendants, the intercom, and her devout daughter Ruth over creamed peas, Swiss steak, and the difference between a faith tested and a faith that is "just creamed peas and Swiss steak."
Ken Bradbury called it his favorite of the hundreds of shows he wrote: "a little jewel box I wanted to create for all the tough people of character I've known in my life." It was, he said, a very personal work, one he never intended to be produced near home. For the first time in his career, Bradbury did not direct his own script — he handed it to Phil Funkenbusch of Petersburg, a director who had worked nationally and once collaborated closely with Edward Albee, and then stepped onstage to be directed in his own play. "It's sort of an out-of-body experience," Bradbury said, "to write the script, to perform it, but to have someone else direct me."
Songs
The show takes its name and its heart from a recurring song, "Sing Me Your Song":
Sing me the songs of your dreaming
Sing them before you leave me...
Come sing the song of your laughter..
Sing it so strong that I know...
Come sing your song ... before it is gone...
Sing me.. come sing me your song.
The lyric braids together with the old hymn "This is my story, this is my song / Praising my Savior all the day long."
Cast
- Paul Leam — Ken Bradbury
- Linda Leam — Sylvia Burke
- Cast — Jodi Heitbrink
- Cast — Felicia Coulter
- Cast — Darlene Edwards
Of Sylvia Burke's Linda, Funkenbusch said: "She is the best kind of actor — she can find the hilarious, laugh-out-loud comedy one moment and then turn around and very realistically deliver some sobering, dramatic monologue the next."
Production Notes
Singing at Seven was produced by the Jacksonville Theatre Guild and presented at the Sophie Leischin Theatre on the grounds of the Jacksonville Developmental Center, September 26–28 and October 3–5, 2003, with 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday performances and 2 p.m. Sunday matinees. Phil Funkenbusch directed.
The script lived a long life before this premiere. An earlier draft from December 2000 carried the title A Room Full of Strangers, and Bradbury and Funkenbusch held unofficial readings for some two years before the official auditions on June 16, 2003, in a former funeral home. Bradbury kept a journal through rehearsals, recording the strange humility of auditioning for his own work, the difficulty of learning lines "with my current mind," and the nightly visits of a small prayer group of neighborhood children — seven of them, led by a boy named Sam — who rang his doorbell at 8:45 each evening asking, "Can we come in and pray?"