February 20, 1992
In honor of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Edna St. Vincent Millay ’17, students from the Vassar Experimental Theater performed an original play in the Powerhouse Theater. The play, “Happy Birthday Vincent,” featured four puppets by puppeteer Amy Trompeter that “[added] a ghostly presence to crucial moments in the production” in addition to a cast of eleven human actors dressed in white.
The actors wrote the script collaboratively by dramatizing a selection of Millay’s poems, each of which “had some connection to major events in [her] life.” The students reported that “knowing that Miss Millay had been a Vassar student made it easier to relate to her,” although “they had a hard time identifying with the Vassar of 1917, where male guests, smoking and skipping chapel were all forbidden.” In the end, though. “we felt like we got her back,” said Denny Partridge, the director of Vassar’s theater.
—The New York Times