Honey to My Mouth
1995 · MacMurray College, Jacksonville, Illinois
Honey to My Mouth was written by Ken Bradbury in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the founding of MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Illinois. Rather than attempt a sweeping, epic history of the school, Bradbury chose to demystify the legend and tell a deeply human story rooted in the early years of the College's birth — the era of the Methodist circuit rider Peter Cartwright and the educator Peter Akers, the men who willed the Illinois Conference Female Academy into existence when it "almost wasn't."
The play opens in the prairie kitchen of the widowed Mrs. Gebhardt and her three daughters — Marie, Alberta, and the tenderhearted young Freida. Into this whirlwind of chickens, scattered stockings, and Sunday-best panic strides the legendary Reverend Peter Cartwright, dressed in black frock and carrying his famous beaver hat. The fictional Gebhardt family gives Bradbury a warm, comic, very real window into a world of camp meetings, cholera, and pioneer struggle, while Cartwright's recruiting visit nudges the story toward the founding of a college for the education of young women.
Bradbury threads the historical narrative through Akers' inner thoughts, letting "the mind of Cartwright" scenes downstage carry the nitty-gritty of getting the school on its feet, while the cabin scenes upstage keep the story personal. As he wrote to his collaborator Sue, his aim was to "convey the knowledge that MacMurray is a thing which almost wasn't, and that very real people with achingly real struggles were involved in its birth."
Cast
- Peter Cartwright — pioneer Methodist circuit rider
- Peter Akers — educator and first president of the permanent organization
- Mrs. Gebhardt — widowed prairie mother
- Marie Gebhardt — the eldest daughter
- Alberta Gebhardt — the second daughter
- Freida Gebhardt — the tenderhearted youngest daughter
- Sophronia Naylor Grubb
- Mary Todd Hinde
- Horace Spauling
Supporting roles — including a Student, two Deans, a Legislator, a Trustee, the Baptist, and the Minister — were doubled among two women and one man, for a compact ensemble of three men and six women.
Production Notes
The play was written in August 1995 for MacMurray College's sesquicentennial; the College traces its founding to 1846 as the Illinois Conference Female Academy (becoming a college after 1851). Bradbury, himself an Illinois College class of 1971 alumnus, designed the production for simplicity: it could be staged in a very small space, needing only two lighting areas — the upstage cabin scenes and the downstage "mind of Cartwright" scenes.
In his cover letter, Bradbury proposed that the one-time anniversary performance might cast adult MacMurray alumni in the roles of the two Peters and Mrs. Gebhardt — suggesting Phil Decker as Akers and noting that Cartwright "would be harder to cast." He grounded the script in genuine research on Cartwright, Akers, J.B. Turner, and the rival claims surrounding the school's origin, while deliberately keeping the human comedy of the prairie family at its heart. The title pages note that when the first classes were held, Cartwright was in his early sixties and Akers in his mid-fifties; no attempt was made to fix the play in a single year, with its incidents and letters drawn from various moments in the College's early history.