Audiences will soon get to experience courtroom dramas inside an actual courtroom. The McLean County Museum of History is partnering with Nomad Theatre Company, a nonprofit company that hosts plays in various settings, to bring a series of justice and power-themed short plays to life for two weekends this month.
The suite of short plays, collectively titled Order in the Court, kicks off Nomad's second season as a year-round company. The production is being directed by retired Illinois University theater professor Lori Adams and will feature play submissions from across the country, including one by local playwright John D. Poling. While all are fictional plays, Poling’s is based on true events in McLean County history.
Staying true to Nomad Theatre’s site-specific aims, Order in the Court will be shown in the Governor Fifer Courtroom at the museum for full effect, seating VIP guests in the jury box and leaning on other architectural features like an austere judge's bench.
In an interview for WGLT's Sound Ideas, Adams and Poling said there was a large turnout for auditions, with 25 actors cast in the evening's 25 roles.
“In this slate of plays, we had such an incredible turnout in auditions that we have 25 roles and 25 actors. We were able to easily cast everyone into something,” Adams said.
Adams said the audience will get to experience a mix of serious and silly topics in the seven 10-minute plays in the series.
“We’ve got contemporary realism [and] we’ve got futuristic plays,” Adams said. “John [Poling] is one of the actors in the company as well and he’s in one of those. We’ve got topical plays … lots of topics come up when you’re talking about law, order [and] justice.”
Stranger than fiction
Poling said he had to carefully follow town history for the creation of his play, titled The Indigent Ladies of Towanda.
The play retells the true story of a large group of women who attacked the Buena Vista Saloon in Towanda, believing alcohol to be the main cause of debauchery by their husbands. While up to 70 women are reported to have participated in the rampage, only 15 were arrested.
In a newspaper account, a bartender recounted that night for the court:
"When the women came in, I told them they must not disturb the wine and cider. They said, 'everything must go.' And it went," the bartender said. "The property destroyed was about 100 dollars—the women said nothing to me except 'everything must go,' but some of them smiled a good deal."
The reporter dubbed the women "the indigent ladies of Towanda," a title Poling could not refuse.
"It was not a positive thing to say about the women," he said, with the article suggesting the taverns owner was a victim of "harsh treatment by the indignant ladies of Towanda."
"It sort of reminds you of 'she persisted,'" Adams said.
The real-life incident took in the second of McLean County's four courthouses, now the site of a 1903 building that became the McLean County Museum of History.
“The ladies of Towanda were actually tried in that courthouse, which Lincoln practiced in," said Poling, who set his play several decades after the raid, with the Buena Vista defendants touring the "new" courthouse.
Director Lori Adams said the play lightly bends history, recounting the incident from the women's perspectives, to allow the moral of the story to shine.
“These women were driven by the idea of saving families," she said. "Men would spend their wages at the Buena Vista. Some of them were alcoholics. Some of them gambled. The women had to put a stop to that, and the target was liquor."
Decades before the temperance movement really took hold in the United States, this was one way a group of women could exercise power and influence.
"We forget how much women were second-class citizens," Poling said. "So for them to take this big of a step and try to eliminate a problem is a pretty big deal. The fact that they did that and empowered themselves is really amazing."
Order in the Court runs Sept. 19-27 at the McLean County Museum of History, 200 N. Main St., Bloomington. Tickets are $15-$40 at nomadtheatre.org.
