Hero (Traveling Theatre)
2012 · Lincoln Land Community College
Hero was the Fall 2012 Traveling Theatre production created by Ken Bradbury's Lincoln Land Community College class (THE 299 J01, "Traveling Theatre"). Built around the theme of personal heroes, the roughly thirty-minute show was devised by Ken and his college students and taken on the road to grade schools throughout west-central Illinois. As Ken framed it for the class on the first day, the semester's work was "Traveling Theatre — 17 schools… Hero," with the students interviewing grade-school children about who their heroes were and weaving those answers into the performance.
The piece grew directly out of the children it played for. Students gathered real "hero stories" from kids at the schools — moms, dads, grandmas, coaches, brothers, sisters, teachers, and the police — and these short first-person testimonies became a recurring spine of the show. The class also reflected on their own heroes, writing personal tributes to mothers, grandmothers, sisters, aunts, and family friends, so that the cast carried the same theme they were asking the children to consider.
Scenes and Material
The show combined scripted audition/ensemble scenes with the documentary-style hero testimonies collected from grade-school audiences. Surviving audition scripts include a pair of scenes between two friends, Morgan and Dana, debating "what do we want to be when we grow up?" and "when you were little, who was your hero?" — scenes that turn the question of heroes back on friendship and honesty. Sets of children's hero statements (for example the Beardstown Brick school) were arranged for the ensemble to deliver in rotation, each performer voicing a different child's story.
Cast
- Kendi Sayre — The Girl
- Erin Washington — Gabriella
- MacKenzie Musch — Capri
- Ellie Crawford — Destiny
- Alex Stanberry — Summer
- Elisabeth Werries — Soleil
- Sydney Meyer — Willow
- Emily Burns — Mikel
- Brittany Davis — Sophie
- Jayson Gomer — Jade
Other class members during the semester included Maddy Albers, Andrew Holtschlag, and Bev Nienhiser, who ran sound on tour (celebrated in a class Christmas poem, "The Tale of Bev, the Tech Babe").
Production Notes
The tour ran in late November and early December 2012, with the troupe leaving from Triopia each morning and playing two to four schools a day. Scheduled stops included North Jacksonville, Franklin, Lincoln (Jacksonville), Roodhouse, Murrayville, Salem Lutheran, Our Saviors, Washington, South Jacksonville, Triopia, Beardstown Brick, Meredosia, Westfair, Eisenhower, and Winchester. In his letter to the schools, Ken noted the show ran about thirty minutes and required only an open space and an electrical outlet.
The class used a Facebook group as its weekly blog, where students posted reflections tied to the hero theme. THE 299 was a practicum course emphasizing performance — staging, acting, choreography, and stage presence — and the traveling tour gave the college students a real audience of grade-school children, many of whom, as Ken noted, "would not see theater in any other way."