Triopia School History Show (Arenzville)
2015 · Lincoln Land Community College
In the spring of 2015, Ken Bradbury and his Lincoln Land Community College theatre class began work on an original, documentary-style show about the founding and naming of the Triopia school district, intended to be performed at Arenzville. Most of the students in the dual-credit class came from Triopia themselves, and the project set out to gather and dramatize the real history of how their school came to be — including the consolidation of communities like Chapin and Arenzville and the sometimes-contested story of how the district got its name.
Ken laid the groundwork himself before turning the class loose on its own interviews. Over the winter of 2014–15 he tracked down and interviewed community members who had lived through the transition, hoping to get "the facts, the skeleton of this show down before the class begins their interviews and gets the juicy stories." The documents that survive are research and journal notes rather than a finished script; the show appears to have been thinly documented here, and no completed script is present in this folder.
Production Notes
- Semester: Spring 2015, alongside the class's larger "Playhouse" show (whose May dates were set while the Triopia show's date never was). As Ken's notes record, "No date yet for Triopia show.." and "The 'Triopia' show at Arenzville is yet to be scheduled."
- The class met every other school day at the Arenzville United Methodist Church, chosen for its room and air conditioning; most students were Triopia students taking the class for dual high-school and college credit.
- Research approach: Ken interviewed the Kershaws — one from Chapin and one from Arenzville, married, both in school at the time of the school transition — and a Chapin woman whose husband had served on the board, plus a former Triopia board member in Jacksonville. He ran into "conflicting accounts of how the school got its name and who decided it" and worked to nail down a reliable version before the students conducted their own interviews.
- Source material: journal entries from December 2014 through January 2015 and a first-day-of-second-semester class note. The page is intentionally brief, reflecting the limited surviving documentation.