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A Brook Tale

2014 · Lincoln Land Community College Traveling Theatre

A Brook Tale is a community memory play woven from the voices of Jacksonville, Illinois, all of them circling the same modest body of water: Town Brook, the local name for the Mauvaisterre Creek that threads some thirty miles through Morgan County. Rather than a single invented plot, the script gathers dozens of first-hand recollections — childhood adventures, near-drownings, floods, pranks, and quiet moments of grace — and lets the creek itself become the central character.

The remembered creek is a place of forbidden delight. Children were told every night, "Don't go near the creek," and so the creek was exactly where they went: catching crawdads with meat scraps from the corner grocery, throwing rocks to watch the water splash, smoking first cigarettes, falling in while fishing, and hollering up at unsuspecting cars through a storm drain by South Main. One contributor recalls walking through the railroad tunnel as a boy and emerging into a stretch so clean and green "it was like walking into Narnia" — and his wish, decades later, to have that Narnia back. Roger Deem's story carries the collection's heart: a teenager who took on the impossible Eagle Scout project of clearing garbage from the brook, and who, in the moment two badgers scampered free through the cleared grass, first saw the waterway not as junk but as a home worth keeping.

The play was assembled from interviews and written contributions by scores of Jacksonville residents and performed by the Lincoln Land Community College Traveling Theatre. Proceeds went toward a children's park along the creek — a fitting return for a show that asked a whole town to remember what the water had given it.

Songs

• Crawdad Song ("You get a line and I'll get a pole...")
• Mud Song

Cast

• Maddy Albers
• Jordan Brenize
• Alana Bunfill
• Ally Bunfill
• Emily Burns
• Elly Crawford
• Brittany Davis
• Katrondra Haley
• Andrew Holtschlag
• Sydney Meyer
• Kenzi Miller
• Mackenzie Musch
• Cydney Musch
• Kendi Sayre
• Alex Stanberry
• Elisabeth Werries

Production Notes

A Brook Tale (also referred to in the materials as Brook Tales) was performed by the Lincoln Land Community College Traveling Theatre. Documented performances were held Saturday, May 17 at 7 p.m. at Grace Methodist Church in Jacksonville, and Sunday, May 18 at 2 p.m. at Centenary Methodist Church, with a free-will offering taken to support a kids' park along the creek.

The script drew on dozens of contributors from in and around Jacksonville — among them Ed and Elisabeth Anderson, Dan Baker, Roger Deem, Guy Crumley, Bob Large, John Love, Greg Olson, Ron Ranson, Andrea Hankins Ruedi, Teresa Schroeder, Linda VanAken, and photographer Steve Warmowski — along with MacMurray College and the men of Sigma Pi. Their interviews, written reminiscences, and stories of the 1926 flood, the Mac riding stables, blacksmith pranks, and the long effort to clean the brook supplied the show's raw material.