New Berlin Tales
New Berlin Tales is a community show built entirely from the memories of the people who lived them. Ken Bradbury shaped it the way he shaped so many of his hometown histories: by listening first. He sent word to the ladies of New Berlin asking them to interview the town's oldest residents — "Don't wait until they're done," he wrote, "my plate's rather full" — and to ask everyone the same handful of questions. What were your most vivid memories of growing up here? Who were the real characters? What changed the town most? And above all: stories, stories, stories.
As Ken planned it, the evening fell into two acts. Act I is a "flyover" history of the village — a brisk, joking sprint from the buffalo and prairie grass of the 1820s through Henry Yates and his general store, the founding of Old Berlin in 1833, and the day in 1869 the township split in two and the southern half, hugging the new railroad, took the name New Berlin. Act II hands the stage over to the residents themselves, their recollections stitched into a warm, comic chorus.
And what recollections. Undertaker John "Digger" McCullough, who doubled as the town's ambulance driver, once slowed the hearse for a complaining drunk — "Well, if you're not going to make it, why hurry?" — and liked to measure napping neighbors for caskets just to watch them sputter awake. There was Shamrock Reed, nosy as they come, whose hook the local pranksters once threatened to drive away with; the out-of-towner conned into pushing a watermelon down Main Street with his nose for a prize that didn't exist; the farm wagon found reassembled on top of a barn the morning after Halloween. The ladies remembered riding horses to school, powdering their legs when nylons grew scarce during the war, hanging May baskets of violets on neighbors' doors, and the secret little door between the pool hall and the ice cream parlor where women weren't supposed to be seen. It is a show about a place small enough that everyone has two names — the one their parents gave them and the one the town gave them.
Cast
- Narrator / Resident — Ron Krohse
- Narrator / Resident — Derek Long
- Narrator / Resident — Bruce Bergschneider
- Narrator / Resident — Sharon Lafauce
- Narrator / Resident — Dottie Crews
- Narrator / Resident — Kacie Wyatt
- Narrator / Resident — Doug Lewis
Production Notes
New Berlin is a village of roughly 1,300 in Sangamon County, Illinois — German and Irish settlers on what the first pioneers called "The Prairie Country," with production agriculture as its backbone and, in recent years, a quiet commuter haven for nearby Springfield and Jacksonville. Ken assembled the script from a remarkable body of source material: ladies' interviews gathered by Valerie Carr, Minnie Price, and others; a separate sit-down with longtime resident Rich Behl; period business advertisements pulled from the New Berlin Tribune of 1924 and 1926 (railway fare to Springfield, forty cents); lists of the town's storied nicknames — Goatie, Punk, Toad, Digger, Muleskinner, the Skull, the Little General — and pages of "assorted stories" from the old-timers.
Rehearsals were held over the first week of August, with the performance planned for August 9. The seven cast members appear as themselves, narrating the village's history and trading the stories of the neighbors who came before them.