April 18, 1980

“You’ve seen it before—but you’ve never seen it done like this,” wrote Meg Inglima ’83 about the studio production in Avery Hall of Francis Beaumont’s comic “play within a play,” The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), directed by Elizabeth St. John Villard ’67. “Under Elizabeth Villard’s direction,” Inglima said, the play “takes on a marvelous quality of playful innocence.”

The second Vassar production of the satiric parody, Villard’s mounting was preceded by that in 1938, directed by John Housman—on leave from Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre—and starring President MacCracken and Philip and Hallie Flanagan Davis and their children.