The Grandma Show
2012 · Lincoln Land Community College
"Happiness is . . . Grandma!" was a class-built show devised by Ken Bradbury and his Lincoln Land Community College Traveling Theatre students during the 2012 school year. Rather than working from an existing script, Ken asked the students to mine their own lives: through weekly blog assignments and interviews they wrote down the foods their grandmothers made, the games they played, the bedtime rituals, the funny habits, the embarrassing moments, and the quiet tendernesses. Ken then wove those firsthand memories into a stage piece, telling the cast plainly, "I have to make a play out of this, so DESCRIBE the experience" — STORIES make theatre, he reminded them, short answers are for social studies tests.
The result is a warm, fast-moving collage of grandmother lore. It opens and closes with a song built from "Take Me Back" (carried over from an earlier Arenzville show) and a re-written ballad about "that sweet, familiar Grandma that I know." Between the music the students trade off a chain of grandmother one-liners and proverbs, then turn to their real grandmothers — adventurous, dangerous, embarrassing, and beloved — recounting tubing trips in Branson, kickball with ice-cream-lid bases, sparkling grape juice with a surprising kick, a grandma talking to her car named Betsy, scarves knitted by the dozen, Old Maid games quietly rigged so the grandchildren would win, and bedtime stories from Guideposts magazines. It is an affectionate, communal portrait assembled entirely from the cast's own family histories.
Songs
- "Happiness is . . . Grandma" — opening and closing number, adapted from "Take Me Back" (Arenzville show) with re-written verses ("That sweet, familiar Grandma that I know").
- "You Are My Sunshine" — used in the show; new game-and-bedtime material was inserted following it.
Scenes and Material
- Grandmother quotes and proverbs — a rapid round-robin of humorous sayings about being and having a grandmother.
- "So who are our grandmothers?" — the students answer in turn: Adventurous! … Dangerous! … Embarrassing! — each tag introducing a true story drawn from their interviews.
- Games with Grandma — Old Maid, Uno, Go Fish, Mexican Train, Yahtzee, Hide and Seek, and more, inserted after "You Are My Sunshine."
- Bedtime at Grandma's — stories, songs like "Jesus Loves Me," warm winter sheets, ice cream and brownies, and Cardinal baseball games.
- Hobbies and habits — knitting, gardening, bowling, sewing, quilting, and Grandma's distinctive ways of dressing.
- Closing reprise — return to the title song and the line "Grandma is . . . Happiness!"
Cast
The performers spoke as themselves and as the voices of their grandmothers (speaker names drawn from the script):
- Elisabeth Werries
- Emily Burns
- Erin Washington
- Maddy Albers
- Sydney Meyer
- MacKenzie Musch
- Kendi Sayre
- Brittany Davis
- Ellie Crawford ("Elly")
- Andrew
Production Notes
Created for Ken Bradbury's LLCC Traveling Theatre class (THE 299, Lincoln Land Community College), a practicum course in which students devised and toured original theatre to grade schools across the Jacksonville, Illinois area. The Grandma Show was built collaboratively over the course of the year: students contributed source material through the class Facebook blog and written interviews, and Ken shaped it into the performance script, expanding it with additional "ad-on" material as more memories came in. Documents preserved with the show include the assembled script, new script material, the grandmother interviews, blog "ad-on" responses, and a collection of ending quotes.