May 18, 1957

The Vassar Experimental Theater produced E. E. Cummings’s play, Him (1927). A non-drama student involved in the production wrote, “we got fascinated with the play which is very weird and stylish and typically Cummings, the way all Cummings is! Miss [Mary Virginia] Heinlein [’25]…is a remarkably gifted director albeit a tyrannical one, and it was exciting to watch her in her transmission of the play and what it meant to her, to the actors, some of them extremely talented, some of them lifeless and insipid as could be. As she screams her directions from the back of the auditorium she is sometimes in a sort of trance-like state of communion with the person on the stage, and what she says, half the play and half Heinlein sounds remarkably like the prophetic ravings of the Delphic Oracle! Very impressive for the novice, of course.”

MS letter

The Experimental Theater produced the play once before, in December, 1944.