One Grand Old Lady
One Grand Old Lady is a documentary readers-theater piece Ken Bradbury wrote for "the Marbold Inc. Ladies" — the group working to preserve the historic Marbold home near Greenview, Illinois. The "grand old lady" of the title is the house itself, Elmwood, and the play traces both the home and the German immigrant family who built it across nearly a century of Illinois history.
The story is told largely in the voice of Margaret Marbold Ennenga, born in 1892, framed as a 1964 letter she sat down to write to her grandson Jonathan in Petersburg. As Bradbury explained in his cover letter to the committee, "whenever Margaret speaks those are the words from her diary," while the surrounding narration is drawn from family records, newspaper accounts, and his own research. Margaret remembers a childhood "before the days of electric lights, the telephone, the automobile or the radio" — and, above all, she remembers her grandfather, Henry Harmon Marbold, whom the family called "Opa."
The play follows the Marbolds from Germany to Illinois: John Marbold and his children, including twelve-year-old H.H., crossed in 1847 after a letter from a brother in America ("Ein gutter Ort, Petersburg"). Their hard Atlantic passage is voiced through the surviving notebook of a fellow immigrant, Johann Behmann, whose pencil entries record the ships sighted, the storms, and the children who died and were buried at sea. From a $10,000 stake, John bought a farm and built Elmwood; his son H.H. — six feet three, blue-eyed, schooled into perfect English at college near Peoria — grew it into thousands of acres, a bank, a store, and a fortune, marrying the poor immigrant girl Margaret Hackman over his father's objections. The piece closes on the family's lavish hospitality, the boardwalk H.H. built to Greenview ("Lover's Lane"), and the love and loss bound up in the old house.
Production Notes
Bradbury designed the play to be simple and flexible for a community cast. As his script directions explain, "The actors sit on stools, facing the audience. All lines are read" — no memorization required — with "costuming generic but correct to the period" and no costume changes. He suggested performing it "in a single act with no intermission directly in front of the house or on the slope southeast of the building."
The three principal speaking roles are Margaret, Narrator 1, and Narrator 2, with Dan accompanying on guitar (hymns include "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" and "Wayfaring Stranger"). The remaining historical figures — H.J. Marbold (Opa), H.H. Marbold, Oma, John Marbold, Behmann, and a gallery of socialites, students, and townsfolk — may be doubled among a handful of actors. Bradbury notes the play "can be performed with a minimum of seven, preferably with nine, but could easily be more."
In his cover letter to the Marbold committee, Bradbury described staying with the project "for several days solid," weaving together Margaret's diary, family papers, and newspaper clippings such as the 1883 Petersburg Democrat account of the Wernsing–Marbold wedding at Elmwood. He stressed that the title was tentative and the script open to revision: "This is not set in stone. I know the author personally and have his permission to rewrite whatever we choose."