Mining for Lost Treasures (Knollwood Oral-History Show)
2010 · Lincoln Land Community College
Mining for Lost Treasures was the second-semester production of Ken Bradbury's spring-2010 Lincoln Land Community College theatre practicum (THE 110). Funded by an LLCC Grant for Innovative Teaching, the project sent Bradbury's students out to interview residents of Knollwood Retirement Village in Jacksonville, Illinois. Over several weeks the students "mined" the treasures of memory — asking the elderly residents about their struggles, their families, their joys, overcoming adversity, and their hopes for the future — recording the conversations on digital voice recorders and transcribing the oral interviews to the class blog. From that blog material the class then constructed a theatrical presentation, performed for the residents and the wider community.
Bradbury described the value of the work in his grant proposal: "When theatre students know that they are working on something real, something actual and before their eyes — like an elderly resident of a retirement home or nursing facility — the work suddenly gains a relevance not often achieved in traditional theatre." The piece drew, too, on local Jacksonville and Beardstown history, with the students' interviews framed under the banner "Big Wheel Keeps on Turning! Why I love this town!" — gathering stories about the fun people had experienced living in Jacksonville.
Production Notes
The show was the second of the two-to-three productions presented during the spring 2010 semester of THE 110 (course section THE 110 JHS 01), an extension of the fall semester's traveling-theatre work. As Bradbury wrote in the syllabus, "The second production of the semester will also involve interviewing residents of a retirement home, gleaning their stories then adapting them to a theatre format." The students also traveled to area elementary schools to guide grade-school students in theatre exercises.
The course outcome, as outlined in the grant, was that each student "will have gained interview skills, as well as become familiar with the processes of editing, dramatization and performing." The grant supplied a set of digital voice recorders for the nineteen-member class, replacing the unreliable cassette and cell-phone recordings the troupe had relied on in earlier oral-history projects.
This page is built from thin surviving source material — chiefly the Grant for Innovative Teaching proposal, the spring 2010 syllabus, and the project notes — so the finished script and full cast of the performance are not preserved here. The spring 2010 class roster included Wes Burton, Jess Clinton, Ryan Harris, Tim Phillips, Annie Schone, Brandon Smith, Erin Washington, Phillip Whited, and John Love.