 This is Dennis McMahon and welcome to Positively Vermont. Today we are going to talk with Professor Peter Harrigan, the creator and director of an original play called Mill Girls, which is being held at the McCarthy Arts Center in St. Michael's College in Colchester, Vermont. Welcome Professor Harrigan. Thank you Dennis. This is a very interesting production. It involves music, it involves history, it involves 14 members of a cast of St. Michael's students. But first of all, tell us a little bit about yourself. Well, I've been teaching at St. Michael's since 1991, but I actually had an experience there before I went to college at St. Michael's and had the opportunity to come back and teach after I finished graduate school and taught at the University of Pittsburgh for a while. And it was wonderful to come back just in terms of St. Michael's being a very intentional community that has strong values. And I found when I worked elsewhere that it was a little bit, it was maybe a little bit colder, not climate-wise, but just sort of people didn't necessarily value working together well, they just valued the end result. And I'm glad at St. Michael's that we really value the whole process and value collaboration and the sort of community building that's involved in that, as well as creating results that the audience will enjoy. That's great. Well, tell us about Mill Girls because this is an original St. Michael's stage production with music. And it's apparently about 14 young women or young women in the textile factories of Winooski, Vermont and Lowell, Massachusetts. Tell us how you got the idea for this. Sure. I actually, so often we get things in the mail that are unsolicited that we end up recycling pretty quickly. But St. Michael's has had an association with Heritage Winooski Mill Museum, which is located inside the Champlain Mill over the years. And I got a newsletter in the mail talking about some aspects of the history that they've really curated and that they present. And it struck me that maybe there were some interesting stories to tell from the Mill, sort of this building that we sort of have in our lives all the time, but we really don't think that much about what originally happened there. So I started to do some digging and was able to put together an application for a sabbatical in order to do more research and try to assemble a play based on that. Throughout the 20th century, really, documentary theater, sort of just like documentary film, has been a genre that certainly Bertolt Brecht started in Germany. The WPA Theater in this country in the 30s kind of furthered that along with the living newspapers. And it's a great way to tell a story sort of from the community by using more presentational techniques. So the audience wouldn't necessarily see it as a work of fiction, but more like kind of a publication that they can take a look at and make decisions about in terms of the content of it. I've directed several plays at St. Michael's that fell into this sort of documentary theater category, and they were all constructed from primary source materials. There's a play called Execution of Justice that I directed in 1991 that is about the trial of Dan White in San Francisco for the killings of George Moscone and Harvey Milk. And it was all pieced together from court testimony, news reporting, other kinds of public documents that anyone really can take a look at. And when we did it, it was a really powerful experience for me and for the students I was working with, just because there was a certain authenticity to the job that the actors do because they know that this is somebody's lived experience. These are actual people that you could Google and see what they're doing now and what their lives were like. And I think for young actors sometimes it's difficult to make an emotional connection to a character, but these were not characters, they were people. And that was a sort of wonderful stepping stone for the students to realize this stuff actually happened and to try to live it out with a deeper sense of the emotional investment that the original participants probably had. When we did that play, it was actually spring of 1992, and about two weeks after the play closed, the verdicts came down in Los Angeles connected to police brutality, video recordings of Rodney King and the very, very light sentences that the perpetrators received, and the students thought, wow, that's just like what happened in San Francisco when Dan White got a very light sentence and riots erupted because justice had not been served in so many people's opinion. And I thought, wow, this is such an interesting thing that the students are using what they learned in the play to help them understand what's happening in the world. And so over the years I've tried to include a number of plays that had that kind of real-world connection. We did a play, a Holocaust play in 2002 about Anne Frank. We actually took students to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., which is just such an incredibly powerful place, sort of short of taking them to the concentration camps. I feel like there's nothing else, at least in this country, that's quite so immersive as that, and it really has an impact on the work you do. I hope they take all of the things that we do very seriously, but the ones that actually happened, I feel like they get just a deeper sense of investment. We had, a few years back, I directed a play called Dead Man Walking, which is based on the book that Sister Helen Prajan wrote about the death penalty, based on her work with actually two different individuals who were incarcerated on death row and trying to sort of get justice for them and save their lives, despite the fact that they had done really intolerable things. So when we were working on it, Sister Helen actually, we were able to get her to come as a speaker, which was very powerful because she's such a wonderful, feisty, energetic, unapologetic person and really sort of inspirational in her own way. And as we were producing the play, it performed two different weekends. And the first weekend we did our performances, and there it was. The Monday after that first weekend was the day that the bombings occurred at the Boston Marathon. And so we've got killers on the loose all week. We've got all these people talking about, oh, they did these terrible things. What are we going to do to them? Justice must be served in revenge and sort of all of these terrible things being tossed around. And we came back the next weekend and did the play in a much more kind of unpleasant and important and vital context because these things were not, you know, oh, of course we're not going to kill other people. But all of a sudden we're thinking, wow, you know, this is something really awful that these people did. How do we find compassion for them and treat them with humanity, even though perhaps they didn't treat others with humanity? There was a whole discussion in that time about one of the brothers who was perpetrated, was killed, and all of these towns were refusing to bury his body. And that just seemed so ripe for discussion, if you know what I mean, because we, sometimes as human beings, you know, want to place limits and sort of punish, I guess. But I think our better selves, hopefully, you know, would have mercy for people who perhaps did not show mercy. But it's just an interesting tension. It's also, it's great on a campus like St. Michael's, given our size, we can get colleagues from other departments to use the show as a text for their class. People from sociology, people from philosophy, ethics classes, psychology classes, they can look at what we're doing, send their students over, and it really does reflect well back onto the discussion that they're having in class. It's also a nice sort of sense of community because they, you know, professors come to see their students in the play and then can talk about that in class when they have them. So it's a great way for us to get a campus-wide conversation going. That's great. Yeah. Well, tell us a little bit about the historical, in fact, we're actually right in the area where the play takes place, where the industry, tell us a little bit about the social and historical and plot context of what Mill Girls is about. Absolutely. When I was starting to do my digging, I found a lot of very exciting and personal and vivid materials about the Champlain Mills just in terms of things that had happened there over the years. But I wasn't necessarily finding kind of a critical mass of stuff that had a kind of built-in story arc. At one point, I thought, well, maybe the first act of the play will be set in 1843 and we'll see sort of what life was like then and then maybe the second act is in 1943. And some of those, you know, French Canadians and Irish immigrants who were battling with each other later get married and have grandkids who also work in the mill. But that sort of felt like it needed a writer and I really don't think of myself as a writer. I've never, one of the vice presidents at St. Michael's asked me recently how many plays I've written and I said, zero. This is it. This is the one. And I really picture myself more as a flow and arranger of things, a compiler of things. I used to make collages when I was a child of movie star photos or pictures of the Red Sox or things that I found interesting and I feel like Mill Girls is sort of almost a literary extension of that, taking all of these kind of scraps that I've found and compiling them in a script and rearranging them and trying to make them kind of active and theatrical. So I sort of was finding Winooski's Greatest Hits, if you will. I was finding all kinds of interesting stories kind of spread over a very broad time span. And my colleague at St. Michael's, Susan Ullat, in the history department, I went to talk to her about how things were going and maybe some other resources because she had written about Winooski. And she sort of led me to information about the Lowell Mills. And Lowell was a fairly, fairly unique place because the city was actually created around the idea of the Mills and the people who worked in the Mills. And at that point in our country there was all kinds of industrial growth happening, but they didn't have enough workers. It was before really the first big waves of immigrants to this country and the manufacturers were kind of scratching their heads trying to figure out how they were going to populate these manufacturing facilities that they were creating. And somebody got the idea that maybe they could get farmers to allow their daughters to go and work in the Mills. But the farmers had these kind of visions in their heads of the Mills in England and sort of all the horrors and abuses that worked there. So the mill owners needed to find ways to guarantee that this would be a wholesome and even educational experience. So when they built Lowell, they built these lovely rooming houses right across the street from the Mills. They had them run by these very strict widows and matrons who could watch over the girls carefully. They supplied all their meals. They created educational programming for the young women to attend at night. They built all these churches and attendance to church was required on Sundays. So they really tried to make this almost like the kinds of things you might send your children to a college for. To just kind of enter the world and have an experience that they might not have outside of the house. And it was really for 10, 12 years, it really was this sort of wonderful utopian kind of thing where a young woman could leave sort of small area. Maybe she's the second daughter. Maybe she doesn't have a dowry. She doesn't have a lot of work opportunities. She could stay on the farm. She could do domestic work if she was lucky. Maybe she could be a school teacher. But here was this whole other thing where she could go off into the world, be independent, make money and maybe come home and buy a house or pay off the family farm or put her brother through college or maybe even put herself through college. Although that was much more unusual in that period of time. And maybe find a husband. Maybe just learn more about herself and sort of what was possible in the world. So it really was this wonderful kind of utopian circumstance that existed. And the young women actually had textile experience because most fabrics were made at home. So they had a sense of how that particular task worked even though it was becoming mechanized with the power looms. And they were good at it. And so they did quite well and enjoyed themselves. And somewhere along the line, the mill owners thought, oh, well, you seem to be doing quite well operating one loom. Let's have you operate two. And then the young women sort of made it work and eventually they thought, well, how about if you operate three? And you can kind of see where this is going. And the young women worked 13, 13 and a half hour days, which was not such a big deal when they had a somewhat leisurely job where they weren't allowed to have books in the factory, but they could have a poem in their pocket or glue a puzzle to the wall near their loom. But as they got to a point where they were really racing from one machine to another with greasy, slippery floors, so many hours a day, they really thought, wow, this is not OK. They, along the lines, the whole country at that point, in different periods in the 1830s and 40s, was suffering some financial setbacks. And the mill owner said, well, I'm sorry, but we need to cut your wages. And they said, well, I'm sorry, but we need to raise the rents on those boarding houses where we require you to live. So their whole kind of life experience and what they expect to derive from it was really just becoming very, very narrow. And because they had had an opportunity to read books from the library because they had had speakers come in on some social issues in the world, and because they were not that far from the Revolutionary War at this point where people said, this is not how we want to live, England. So let's take this back for ourselves. They started to push back a little bit. They started to have things like strikes and organizing ways that could get their employers to get their message. Eventually, they actually formed labor organizations. They formed something called the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association that was one of the first sort of, not a union, but one of the first labor organizations in the country. They eventually joined forces with the male labor organizations and the women were officers in these joint operations. So even long before they get the right to vote, they really are showing incredible pride and agency and making some prospects for themselves and a little bit of progress pushing against the capitalist, greed-induced force. Somewhere along the line, this is actually another reason why I think Lowell was very appealing to me and Winooski a little bit less. So Lowell and Winooski, they were producing wool for the most part and from locally grown sheep and a whole kind of nice tidy local organization. In Lowell, they're producing cotton and some of the speakers that they start to have at their evening events are abolitionist speakers like John Greenleaf Whittier and the young women are seeing that they are part of a fairly corrupt system. So the enslaved Africans in the south are picking this cotton and then the underpaid, overworked young women in the north are processing it and they thought, oh gosh, what can we do to, number one, to help our brothers and sisters in the south and number two, to kind of get ourselves out of this situation, which is not, which is making other people money but isn't something that contributes to the world. It's something that really takes away from it. So that's sort of the arc that we use in the play and that the cotton part of it I think is more particular to Lowell than Winooski. And these mill girls, what type of experiences will the audience hear from them? What's the, not the message but what is the context of these mill girls and the lives of what people experience? All kinds of things. It really kind of takes you through the whole process, how they learned about Lowell, how they got to Lowell, why they went to Lowell. You know, were they trying to seek more independence? Were there financial problems at home? Did they want to help out the family? Did they want to buy new clothes or a piano? You know, all of these, all of these things are, you know, some of the reasons that sent them there. What it was like to be there and away from home. I think people, certainly my students don't necessarily have as deep a sense of what it's like to be away from home so connected to their homes with their phones and email and texting and sort of all of that. The world is a much smaller place. All of these people had was letters, you know, which took a few days to get back and forth and you really, you lived for that communication with the people in your lives which was, you know, not immediate, you know, in the way that we're accustomed to now. We look at their romantic lives. We actually have a character named Delia who has an Act I romance and an Act II romance and I'm not going to say how they end, but you can assume that it might be, might be poorly sort of look at that aspect. We look at their religion because that was, you know, certainly a much more common part of people's lives in the 19th century than it is now. Just how they sort of shopped around for churches, you know, as part of the second great awakening in this country where all kinds of people were sort of looking around for preaching style and sort of a theology that spoke to them rather than just doing, attending the church that their parents had attended or brought them up in. We look at their education, sort of the things they learned and then we start to see how things unravel and how they kind of fight back and then eventually extract themselves from the situation. You know, they certainly, they did make progress and kind of make their presence known but then, you know, 18, late 1840s you get the Irish potato famine, you get all kinds of people coming to this country who don't have, you know, their family farm to return to or don't have savings that they could use to move out west. They're kind of stuck in whatever circumstances the capitalists set up for them because, you know, they were starving in one country and now they, you know, are just grateful to be somewhere else and don't feel like they really have agency. Tell us about the musical component of this. This little collage that I've made is all from primary sources. It's all, well, 99% from things that actual people actually said that I've sort of put together into this context. And I wondered, you know, I sort of wondered if there would be musical primary sources out there. Protest songs, popular songs, church music, other examples from the period that would kind of fuel this story. And I've had a friendship with Tom Cleary for about 20 years now. We've worked together on several productions. He's a local composer and jazz pianist and arranger and teacher and just general wonderful sort of collaborative type. And we haven't actually worked together on a show since the year 2000. And I ran into him a couple times a year probably. And, you know, one of those times, one or both of us would say, we should find something to work on. And it just hasn't happened kind of organically in the time since. But back in, I guess, 2015 when I was thinking about this project and applying for a sabbatical in order to do the research, I said to Tom, you know, hey, you know, I've got this mill thing started. Is there, you know, is there a way that you might have interest in this and just availability in your schedule to do the work? Because, you know, it's sort of a lot of work that he's done to pull it all together. And he thought, I could get interested in that. And he's really been amazing in terms of using his expertise to kind of dig through, you know, materials that I wouldn't have thought of, popular songs and little-known sort of gems that he has either found intact or things that he has found and adapted or taken poetry and set it to music or sometimes really, you know, to my mind, creating music out of thin air. We had, as I was sort of putting the show kind of into the computer, we had Act One and we had Act Two and then we had this thing called the morgue, which was all of the stuff that we'd either cut or we couldn't really find a place for and we, you know, weren't sure, but we still liked it. And Tom was always going into the morgue and sort of pulling out these things and setting them to music and finding ways to really knit the story together with the music. There's one character in the play, Delia, the character who has the romantic troubles and she actually is based on a real person, Delia Page, who was from New Hampshire and went off to work in the Lowell Mills. And what we have of Delia is all of the letters that she received when she was a mill girl and they were collected and, you know, ended up in a library somewhere where we could find them but Delia never speaks. It's all of these people saying to Delia, oh, Delia, how's it going? Delia, you should do this, you should do that. And the parents kind of get wind of her getting involved with this kind of rough type and, you know, try to discourage her and we never hear Delia speak. But Tom found this great song from the period called The Blacksmith about a young woman who sort of goes too far down the wrong path of the wrong man and kind of lives and grows as a result of the experience. So Tom was able to take that song and kind of blend it together with the letters and give Delia a voice. So it's really, the music, I think, is very well integrated into the story. That's great. Yeah. And in addition to Tom that he has an ensemble that's going to perform with him. Yeah, he has. Tom has been, was triple duty really. He was working with me in sort of the research and construction part of the show, putting it all together. And then since September he has been working with the students, teaching them the music. And then on the occasional Sunday he's been working with the band that will play during the show, which has some great players. Tom is playing piano and accordion and his wife, Emergy Laurentiis, who's also a very noted local musician and singer and teacher, is going to be playing the accordion and the drums and maybe a little bit of keyboard. And Bill Ellis, who teaches in the Fine Arts Department at St. Michael's, who's a scholar of jazz and rock and American music for the most part. He also is a very, very fine guitarist and he's going to be playing, I think, three different guitars in a banjo in the course of the show. And then my husband, Stan Baker, will be playing the cello. So we've got this great little ensemble that's been working on their own and then this coming Thursday we'll add them in with the actors and kind of figure out that whole balance. This sounds very exciting. And it's going to start, do you have five performances? We have five, yeah. It's Thursday, Friday, Saturday, November 2, 3 and 4, and then the following Friday and Saturday, which is the 10th and 11th. And all of the performances are at the McCarthy Arts Center on campus in Colchester and free and open to the public. That's amazing. Yeah. Tell us some of the people who have been assisting in this. I don't want to use the word sponsors, but maybe sponsors. Yeah, I'll join with you in this. Absolutely. One of my sort of primary collaborators and friends is a man named John Paul Devlin, who is the scenic and lighting designer and the resident technical director for our program during the school year. And he's created this amazing research-based three-dimensional set that looks a whole lot like a factory. And that's been exciting just to see that come to life. We also are lucky because we've had some, a lot of connections with the heritage. Winooski Mill Museum and Miriam Block, the director who's been a great sponsor. And a couple of companies down there, MyWeb Grocer, has given a space for some performances we're going to actually hold in the mill for school children. And then Waterworks Restaurant is doing promotion where if people were to attend, go to Waterworks on November 2nd. Before they go to the play, 10% of the proceeds from the dinners would be contributed to the mill museum. So that's really a great kind of connection that they're forming. That's great. And we're going to publish the website and there's further information and there's posters and things of that nature. So people can find out more about Mill Girls, which is premiering November 2nd at St. Michael's College. And I want to thank my guest today on Positively Vermont, Professor Peter Harrigan, the creator and director of Mill Girls. Thank you for being with us. Thank you, Dennis. And congratulations on a tremendous effort and good luck on November 2nd. Or as they say, break a leg. Exactly, exactly. Thank you. Thanks very much. This has been Dennis McMahon for Positively Vermont.