BCC Theatre 2005 - 2005

Notes On The Production -  from Director Katherine Bacon: The cast, musicians and I were often inspired while working on this great piece of dramatic poetry. The words of now famous characters like Fiddler Jones, Harry Wilmans, Emily Sparks, Reuben Pantier, Minerva Jones, Shack Dye, Anne Rutledge, Roscoe Purckapile, Knowlt Hoheimer, Archibald Higbie and so many others provided us with rich material to study and reinterpret for the contemporary audience. We were able to make the connections between their century and the one we now live in – discovering that there is not much difference, really, in human experience.  When we began to work with the music, a whole new dimension of the work was revealed.  It enhanced the dramatic effect of the monologues and gave us more of a sense of the breadth and scope of the work.  We chose the monologues carefully, trying to give an overall view of the work and yet creating our own version. Audiences were enthralled. What began as Edgar Lee Masters series of poems about his boyhood experiences in western Illinois was the beginning of Spoon River Anthology (1915), the book that would become one of the most widely known works in all of American literature. The music was created when the book was adapted for the stage. Though he would never equal the achievement or fame of Spoon River Anthology, Masters continued writing for nearly thirty years. In the 1920s and 1930s Masters wrote novels and biographies of Mark Twain, Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln.