There's a dark story behind the writing of "Conversation at Midnight," which Millay first completed in 1936. She had only one copy of the manuscript, and took it with her on a vacation trip to Florida. The hotel caught fire, and the manuscript was destroyed.
Several months later, as she tried to recreate the script from memory, Millay had a serious car accident that caused severe nerve damage to her back and right arm, from which she never fully recovered. But the play won critical acclaim for Millay, and it is held up as an example of the author's poetic versatility.
Members of the Everyman Repertory Theater rehearse "Conservation at Midnight."
"She uses everything from the sonnet, to highly-formalized poetic forms, down to Ogden Nash impersonations," says Paul Hodgson, artistic director of the Everyman Repertory Theater, and one of the seven actors gathered in the basement of the Church of Christ Congregational in Camden, each in black formal attire.
The characters include a priest, an advertising executive, and a Communist poet. The play, says Hodgson, takes the form of a conversational poem, which conjures up an after-dinner discussion of love, and war, politics and religion. "And you know some of it is extremely funny and some of it beautiful verse -- it's not verse, it's poetry, in fact," he says.
"Sometimes it works like a normal play, so you have a character name and then a set of dialogue following," Hodgson says. "And sometimes you have the action narrated so there are people saying 'said Merton' and 'said Pygmalion,' and that happens every now and then throughout the play, depending on how she plays and how the meter dictates."
"This certainly speaks to some of her amazing writing," says Everyman actor David Troup, who plays John the portrait painter.
Troup says that at one point in the play, Anselmo the priest, played by Jennifer Hodgson, decides to remove herself from the conversation, "Being that people have not been taking to her explanations of the necessity of faith and beauty of God," he says. "She then goes to play Bach and in essense recreates some of the beauty that she is talking about through her poetry within the actual music."
Troup and Hodgson say they hope the tour of staged readings will shine a light on the work of a poet whose origins are firmly planted in midcoast Maine
"She grew up in Rockland, went to high school in Camden, and of course became the first woman to win the Pulizter Prize for poetry," Troup says. "And we hope this active reading of her poetry will help people familiarize themselves with her work, while at the same time getting a chance to meet seven characters that she created through her poems."
"I should point out that we are standing in the church that her family attended and that she went to Sunday school in," Hodgson says.
Keith Shortall: "In fact some of the venues you have chosen are connected to her in some way?"
Paul Hodgson: "Yes, that's right. We were not able to perform at the Whitehall in Camden, which is where she was discovered reading her poem 'Renascence,' because it's closed and it's winter, but hopefully this summer we'll be able to put that to rights. But yes, we chose the church because it was her church and she came here and we chose the Camden Public Library and the reading room there because I'm sure she read poems in there and borrowed books from there as well. We're doing it in Rockland because she was born in Rockland, but she actually lived in Camden, Rockport and Hope as well, so we've tried to spread it around to her roots in Maine."
The Everyman Repertory Theater production of Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Conversation at Midnight" opens at the First Church of Christ Congregational this Friday at 7:00 p.m., and will move Sunday to the Farnsworth Art Museum Auditorium at 2:00 p.m.
For more information on the production, including a complete list of dates and times for the March tour, click here.