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Scoundrels & Saints, Lovers & Lunatics: A Celebration of Virginia at 175

2011 · Town Square, Virginia, Illinois (Virginia Barbecue)

"They handed me 175 years of history," Ken Bradbury liked to say of this commission, "then said, 'Make a play!'" And that is what he did. Written for the 175th birthday of Virginia, Illinois, and presented on the Town Square as part of the Virginia Barbecue, Scoundrels & Saints, Lovers & Lunatics sweeps through the town's long story in a single afternoon. Commissioned by Cass Communications of Virginia and directed by Bradbury himself, the readers-theatre piece featured a cast of a dozen actors drawn from Virginia, Beardstown, Jacksonville, Arenzville, Concord, Chapin, and Franklin.

Bradbury spent months digging through the town's crumbling histories, biographies, and bystander accounts, and the play does not flinch from the spicier material. It opens with a fourth-wall-breaking argument over how the story should be told — one actor interrupting the polished "fine covered wagons and neat boundary lines" narration to insist on the truth: squatters, lean-tos, pigs kept in the cabin, and the unforgiving prairie. From there the show moves through the founding of Virginia by Dr. Henry Hall in 1836, the Kickapoo and Pottawatomie who came before, the publicity men who lured settlers westward with songs about the "garden land" of "Elanoy," and the harrowing Day of the Big Freeze of December 20, 1836, when the temperature dropped from forty above to twenty below in minutes and men and cattle froze where they stood.

Among the discoveries Bradbury surfaced: the football season cancelled when a windstorm blew the ball into a neighboring cornfield; the policewoman hired to arrest the ladies of the evening; the great war between the grocery stores; "Bippo the Wonder Dog"; the movement to ban movies on Sunday; the midnight raid on the Beardstown courthouse; the effort to outlaw indoor toilets; and the doctor who killed more patients than he cured — alongside genuine heroes such as Thomas Beard, who chopped firewood through a blizzard to save a stranded family seven miles from town. "Every town has its scoundrels and saints, and more than a few lunatics," Bradbury said, "but when I began researching the history of Virginia I discovered that for once these remarkable people from history had not been covered up."

Production Notes

Bradbury kept a journal during the writing, titled Poison Ivy Got Three Votes (or: Charles Thompson… I cut ice!) — "a brief journal of a brief show among newfound friends." It records the autumn of 2010 spent reading four enormous local histories ("How can there be four large books about Virginia? It's not that big a town"), chili-and-chat sessions with local historians Judy Briggs, Billy Reynolds, and Ann Prather, and the snowed-out Springfield rehearsals of early 2011. Deliberately scaled down from the elaborate pageant staged for the town's 150th, Bradbury chose an intimate readers-theatre approach: "Methinks we'll be thinking simpler on this one." The piece carried real weight for him as well — his journal pauses to remember Greg Mahlandt, who had led the 1986 production, "such a talented man, such a good man."

Cast