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Lilacs, Land, and Long-Necked Chickens

2019 · Pike County, Illinois — Pike County Farm Bureau, Hull United Methodist Church, Perry United Methodist Church, and Pittsfield

Lilacs, Land, and Long-Necked Chickens was one of the last shows Ken Bradbury wrote — a readers' theatre crafted to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Pike County Farm Bureau. True to the form he loved, Ken did the work of a historian as much as a playwright: he gathered a voice recorder, drove to Cedarhurst to interview his father, Elmer, and then handed the project to Lynn Curry and Mikki Rush, who fanned out across the county. From roughly a hundred hours of interviews with the people who knew Pike County best — its farmers — Ken wove a script that lets the land tell its own story.

The play opens 10,000 years back, when the last glacier retreated and scoured out the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers, leaving the highlands and prairie that became Pike County. From there it tumbles forward through the county's place names — Nebo and Fishhook, Atlas and Hull, Grubb Hollow, Rattlesnake Ridge, Swan Slough and Gasville — and into the voices of the people themselves: a great-grandfather who took four years to flee the German army and never saw his family of fourteen again; a man who raised enough hogs to build a 1,900-square-foot house; the woman who walked the levee to her schoolhouse carrying a gun for snakes. There is the gas-rationed wartime choice between Saturday shopping and Sunday church, the box of shared tin cups passed from party to party, the hen's-nest snake, and the corn picker so cold the driver was warmer lying in the snow underneath it. It is, finally, a love letter to a place: as Keith Bradbury's closing line puts it, "God made a lot of places that folks call home. For us... well... for us, he made Pike County."

Because Ken could not see the production through himself, the show carried a special weight. At Keith's encouragement, MJ accepted Lynn Curry's invitation to direct it — a humbling task she described as "directing Ken's show." Over four months of rehearsals and frequent road trips across the county, a cast of Pike Countians grew from reading the script to reliving the stories, until one night in mid-June no one needed the page at all.

Music

Ken scored three songs into the opening of the script and noted that, if those couldn't be performed, "any sort of fiddlish music will be okay." The company took the hint and added music between scenes throughout.

Judy Steers assembled the music selections to fit each topic, Charlotte Dunham accompanied, and Cleve Curry's fiddle anchored the score.

Cast

Production Notes

Written by Ken Bradbury for the centennial of the Pike County Farm Bureau, with the show's final line contributed by his brother Keith Bradbury. Directed by MJ in 2019. The readers were seated on stools, in keeping with the readers' theatre format.

The interviews behind the script were gathered by Lynn Curry and Mikki Rush and transcribed by Lynn; Teresa Goetten and Judy Steers shaped the music; Blake Roderick and Julie Boren handled publicity and the program; Craig Boyd supplied sound, with Lynn and Kim Curry and later Aaron Barger running the board. Elmer Bradbury contributed both interview stories and a handmade two-foot ear of corn (in its own carrying case) as a prop.

The production played four sold-out weekend performances on the third weekend of June 2019 across Pike County — at the Pike County Farm Bureau in Pittsfield, the Hull United Methodist Church, and the Perry United Methodist Church.