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Stoops

2012 · Hoogland Center for the Arts, Springfield, Illinois

Stoops is a front-porch tale, a two-act comedy about growing old without going gentle. It tells the story of two long-time friends, Murial Wheatley and Sophie McGuire, who spend their mornings on their porches (their stoops) in daily, affectionate combat as they fight to maintain their independence in a world intent on "putting them away." Around them move a middle-aged son and his wife, a young girl, and a retirement-home manager who keep trying to decide what is best for these two ladies who have already decided for themselves.

Bradbury wrote the play after a backstage challenge. In February 2011, as From Behind the Curtain closed at the Hoogland, actress Marian caught him in the hall and asked, "So when are you going to write a play for a couple of old broads like Sylvia and I?" Within days he had two porches, two personalities, and a page that began "Act I." His journal records a play that came almost effortlessly — "the least number of edits that I've ever done to a show, like God was saying, 'No, this is the one I gave you.'" He drew openly on the people he loved, above all his 92-year-old father, a former bank president who wore a music-playing reindeer hat to take up the church collection and once told a state trooper it was "probably too late" to teach him to slow down at 91.

The play is a comedy, but a tender one. Sophie and Murial are not the crotchety or granny-ish stereotypes Bradbury despised; each completes and envies the other, one the free spirit, one the level head, both proof that "growing old is hard, but our outlook is everything." Bradbury anchored the play in the spirit of Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night." As he wrote in his director's note: "I confess a special kinship to the people of Stoops. I know them. You know them. I pray that we might all become them."

Musical Numbers

Original interlude and pre-scene music was composed and performed live each night by Brock Gwaltney of Routt Catholic High School in Jacksonville. The score wove through the scene transitions, with the Doxology underscoring Murial's DMV driving test, the Tennessee Waltz for Paula and Sophie on the porch, and a recurring chickadee birdsong threaded across both acts as a quiet signal of hope.

Cast

Production Notes

Stoops premiered at Springfield's Hoogland Center for the Arts, presented by the Springfield Theatre Centre in Theatre Three, with performances March 16–18 and 23–25, 2012. Curtain was 8 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays and 2 p.m. on Sundays. Ken Bradbury, an Arenzville resident, both wrote and directed the show; Bill Bauser of Petersburg produced.

The six-character comedy featured two real-life husband-and-wife teams — the Yales of Petersburg and the Coulters of Springfield — with Brenda Yale appearing in her first play since high school. Haley Londrigan of Chatham was cast as the young Paula after eighteen girls auditioned for the single youth role. The play opened to what Bradbury called "rave reviews," with audiences repeatedly thanking the cast: "That's the nicest compliment you can get. They'd been given a gift."

The show drew interest well beyond central Illinois. A theatre group from Arkansas, led by former Jacksonville resident Roger Cannell, licensed the play and flew a production team to Springfield to watch the premiere ahead of their own September 2012 staging. At the time of the production, Bradbury — recently retired from 34 years of public-school teaching, an adjunct theatre instructor at Lincoln Land Community College, and the resident honky-tonk piano player on the Spirit of Peoria riverboat — had four other original shows slated for the same year.