Play will set scene before big clash

July 30, 2008

By Edward Husar

The festive atmosphere in Quincy leading up to the historic debate between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas on Oct. 13, 1858, will be the focus of a special theatrical production later this summer.

The play, "Mud, Mystics and Molasses: Lincoln and Douglas Come to Quincy," will be presented one time only at 7 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 6, at the Quincy Community Theatre in the Oakley-Lindsay Center.

The play will be free and open to the public. Seating will be on a first-come, first-served basis, with the doors opening at 6:30 p.m.

"There are 500 seats, and our hope is to fill the place," said Reg Ankrom, a member of Quincy's Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, which is sponsoring the production as part of the local celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Lincoln-Douglas Debate this fall and the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth in 2009.

"The special nature of it is it's going to be produced one time, and those who see it will have seen a sort of conceptual art because it may not be performed again until the bicentennial of the debates (in 2058)," Ankrom said.

"Our hope is that people will come and pass it along as part of our oral history of this celebration."

The play is the creation of Illinois playwright Ken Bradbury, a Pike County native who now lives in Arenzville.

Bradbury, a longtime educator, most recently has been a teacher at Lincolnland Community College in Jacksonville. He also writes a syndicated humor column, "The Coon Ridge Digest," that appears in 14 newspapers in Missouri, Illinois and Indiana.

But Bradbury also has been making a name for himself as the author of a growing number of plays related to Abraham Lincoln, with an emphasis on Lincoln's younger years preceding his rise to the presidency.

Quincy's play is tied to the Lincoln-Douglas Debate, but it focuses not on the debate itself but on some of the events and atmosphere leading up to the historic confrontation in Washington Park -- the sixth of seven sites where Lincoln and Douglas debated while competing for a U.S. Senate seat.

The fast-paced narrative and musical play takes a lighthearted look at some of the issues and events that brought Lincoln and Douglas to Quincy.

Eight characters and a musician -- Bradbury himself, playing period tunes on either an accordion or piano -- make up the cast. The stars of the show will be Lincoln and Douglas themselves, speaking snippets of actual dialogue drawn from newspapers, books and other historical sources from the mid-1800s.

Lincoln will be portrayed by Greg Bergschneider of Franklin, and Douglas will be portrayed by Don Schneider of Springfield. Other cast members from the Springfield-Jacksonville area are primarily former students of Bradbury's.

Bradbury said he tried to make the play interesting by focusing on the atmosphere in Quincy just before the debates, which was replete with "balloon ascensions, mystic seers who came to town and the fact that it rained 16 straight days before the debate."

Mud was everywhere on the day of the debate, and some youngsters, including a fictional character in the play named Travis, profited by charging 5 cents to help push wagons out of the muck.

Bradbury said he tried to blend historical accounts with music and lighthearted anecdotes to help make the Lincoln-Douglas debate come alive for playgoers.

"I hope it's very accessible to people who know very little about the debates," he said.

The play will be presented in a "reader's theater" style. Cast members will face the audience and read from scripts with modest staging.

"I find that reader's theater engages the audience more readily than regular theater with a staged piece, because the actor is looking right at you, practically on top of you, and frankly you don't have the distractions," he said.

Bradbury said he honed his playwriting skills through years of trial and error at seeing what works and what doesn't on stage.

"I basically learned to write plays by sitting in the audience of my plays and dying," he said with a smile.

Bradbury was in Quincy last week to check out the facilities at the Quincy Community Theater. Ankrom said the QCT and the Oakley-Lindsay Center have agreed to donate the use of their facilities for the play.

"This is their contribution to the sesquicentennial promotion," he said.