New Salem Coonridge Devotions
A warm, funny, and unexpectedly tender evening of "devotions," New Salem Coonridge Devotions gathers the lived comedy of small-town church life into a Readers' Theatre revue written by Ken Bradbury. Staged outdoors at New Salem's Theatre in the Park on June 30 (moving inside only if rain drove the cast indoors), the show drew on Bradbury's beloved Coonridge world — that imagined backwater of Methodists, Presbyterians, and the occasional Holy Roller — to laugh gently at the foibles of the faithful while quietly honoring the grace beneath them.
The material is a string of monologues, choral hymns, and quick one-liners delivered from stools by a small ensemble. Between the laugh lines about combines parked at the church door, sleeping deacons, gossips who now just "share," and a piano player named Pearl Hoffstead who could drag a hymn long enough for babies to be born during it, the evening turns again and again toward something true. A child's honest prayer ("God we ain't too good here on the back row. Please help us to not screw up."), a girl named Becky who comforted mourners at her own family's funerals, and a honky-tonk pianist who finds Jesus in "Victory in Jesus" all sit shoulder to shoulder with the jokes. As Bradbury wrote to his cast: "God is good, my friends. One of God's greatest gifts is the friends He gives us...and when we can do a show to boot...well...Amen!"
Because it was Readers' Theatre, there was nothing to memorize — but, as Bradbury reminded everyone, the more familiar the cast was with the material, the better the show. The result is an archive of his particular voice: reverent and irreverent at once, rooted in the rhythms of rural Illinois congregations and the music that holds them together.
Running Order
Act I
- Opening solo: "There's a Land That Is Fairer Than Day" / "Sweet By and By" (choir and cast enter)
- Opening Lines (music under)
- Introduction to the evening (All)
- Last Laugh (Ken, Sheri, Page, Joe)
- Holy Roller (Ken, Bob, Sylvia)
- "Bringing in the Sheaves"
- Holy Giggles (Page)
- Becky (Ken)
- "It Is Well with My Soul"
- A Grand Theft (Ken, Bob)
- Comeuppance (Sylvia, Sheri, Bob)
- A Small Prayer (Ken, Joe)
- Solo: "Just as I Am" (Rick, then choir)
- Saved Again (Joe)
- The Happy Heart (Bob and Sylvia)
- Ten Commandments (All)
- "Sweet By and By"
Act II
- "Standing on the Promises"
- Opening Lines (music under), then "Standing on the Promises" reprise
- Jack Parr (Ken)
- Camp Sunshine (Page, Joe, Sheri, Bob, Sylvia)
- Choir: "Kum Ba Yah"
- New Paint (Bob, Sylvia)
- Solo: "Amazing Grace" (Becky, then choir)
- Church Music (All): "Holy, Holy, Holy," "Victory in Jesus"
- Closing Lines (All)
Cast
- Performer — Ken Bradbury (author; teacher at Triopia High School; the "only Presbyterian pianist at the Arenzville Methodist Church")
- Performer — Sheri Miles (Department of Natural Resources; veteran of the Jacksonville Theatre Guild)
- Performer — Page Roth (incoming Jacksonville High School freshman; The Miracle Worker, The Philadelphia Story)
- Performer — Joe Cates (incoming Triopia High School freshman; Distant Thunder)
- Performer — Sylvia Burke (Illinois School for the Deaf; Coonridge and Vachel shows)
- Performer — Bob Large (painting contractor from Jacksonville; Abraham, Vachel with a V)
- Soloist — Becky McCartney (Pittsfield; sings with the gospel group Breath of Glory)
- Soloist — Rick Barger (Pittsfield; Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat)
- Pianist — David Zink (co-keyboardist with Bradbury at the Arenzville UMC)
- Choir — The Grace Methodist Choir of Jacksonville, directed by Stephanie Smith-Jarratt
Production Notes
The show was performed June 30 at New Salem's Theatre in the Park, an outdoor venue near the reconstructed New Salem historic site in central Illinois, with an indoor contingency in case of rain. Bradbury wrote and directed the piece as Readers' Theatre, gathering an ensemble drawn largely from his circle of Jacksonville-area theatre friends and former students — many of them veterans of his Christian Performing Arts Camp at Green Pastures Retreat Center.
Vocal soloists Rick Barger and Becky McCartney joined the production, with David Zink at the keyboard and a choir of "wild and woolly" Grace Methodists from Jacksonville under Stephanie Smith-Jarratt — who, by Bradbury's own joke in the bios, "were tricked into performing tonight by telling them our sanctuary was air conditioned." Rehearsals were planned for just a couple of evenings in late June, around Bradbury's camp commitments. A companion "Methodist ministers" running order in the source materials adapts the same sketches into a Christmas-themed variant with carols, suggesting the devotions were reworked for more than one occasion.