girls which is being held that the mccarthy arts center in st michael's college in cold chester are welcome professor thank you denis this is a very interesting production that involves a music involved history than volves fourteen members of a cast of st michael students but first of all tell us a little bit about yourself well i've been teaching at st michael since one nine hundred ninety one but i actually had a experience there before i went to college at st michael's and how 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 those maybe a little bit colder not not 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 you know it's at michael's that we really are value the whole process and value collaboration and the sort of community building that's involved in that as well as you know creating results that the audience will enjoy that's great will tell us about no girls because this is the original  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 when you ski mill museum which is located inside 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 in the throughout the twentieth century really documentary theater sort of just like documentary film has  been certainly bertold brecht started in germany the w p a theater in this country in the thirty's 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 pla called execution of justice that i directed in one thousand nine hundred one that is about the trial of dan white in san francisco for the killings of george moscone and harvey milk and it was all piece together from court testimony news reporting other kinds of you know public documents that that anyone really can take a look at and it was when we when we did it it was a really powerful experience  for me and for the students i was working with just because it there was a certain oh this is certain authenticity to the job that the actors do because they know that this is somebody who's lived experience you know these are actual people that you could google you know 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 the 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 one thousand nine hundred two and about two weeks after the play closed the verdicts came down in los angeles and 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 you know 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 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 you know nothing else at least in this country that's quite so immersive as that and it really it has an impact you know it has an impact on the work you do and i hope they take all of the things that we do very seriously but the ones that actually happen to feel like they get just a deeper sense of investment we had a few years back we directed a play called dead man walking which is based on the book that sister helen prejean 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 to fight this fight 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 is 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 you know and there it was and then the monday after that first weekend was the day that the bombings occurred at the boston marathon and so we've got you know 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 you know and revenge and sort of all of these terrible things being tossed around  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 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  of one of the brothers who was a perpetrator was killed in all of these towns were refusing to bury his body and that just seemed so ripe for discussion if you know if you know what i mean  because we sometimes as human beings you know want to place limits and sort of punish us 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 on to the discussion that they're having in class so 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 so it's it's a great way for us to get a campus wide conversation going well tell us a little bit about the historical fact we're actually right in the area where the play is takes place where the the industry tell us well what about the social 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 had i thought well maybe the first act of the play will be set in one thousand nine hundred three and we'll see sort of what life was like then and then maybe the second act is in one nine hundred forty three and some of those some of those you know french canadians and irish immigrants who are 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 over it and i said zero this is it this is the one and i really picture myself more as a ranger of things things i used to make collages when i was a child of you know movie star photos or you know pictures of the red sox or things that i found interesting and i feel like milk girls is sort of almost a literary extension of that taking all of these kind of scraps that i found and compiling the in a script and rearranging them and trying to make the kind of active and theatrical so i sort of was finding new skis 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 sousa knew that in the history department you know i went to talk to her about how things are going and maybe some other resources because she had written about when you ski and she sort of led me to information about the lol 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 us 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  creating and somebody got the idea that 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 work 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 lol they built these lovely rooming houses right across the street from the mills they had them run by these very strict widows and made friends 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 so and attendance the church was required on sundays so they really tried to make make this almost like almost like the kinds of things you might send your children to a college for you know 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 ten twelve years it really was this sort of wonderful utopian kind of thing where young woman could leave you know sort of a 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 schoolteacher 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 may be just learn more learn more about herself and sort of what what was possible in the world so it really was this wonderful kind of utopian circumstance that existed and the young woman actually had a textile experience because most fabrics were made at home so they had a sense of how 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 you seem to be doing quite well operating one loom let's have you operate two you know and then you know when the young women sort of made it work eventually they thought well how about if you operate three and you know you can you can kind of see where this going and the young women worked thirteen thirteen and a half hour days which was which was not such a big deal when they had a somewhat leisure early job where they could you know they weren't allowed to books in the factory but they could you know have a poem in their pocket or you know 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 greasy slippery floors off so many hours a day they really thought wow this is this is not ok they along the lines the whole country at that point in different periods in the hundred thirty s and forty's 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 you know their their whole kind of life experience and what they expected 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 you know some social issues in the world you know and because they were not that far from the revolutionary war at this point where people said you know this is not how we want to live and go and so you know let's take this back for ourselves they started to push back a little bit they started to have things like strikes and organize in ways that could get their employers to get their message eventually they actually formed labor organizations they formed something called the lo female 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 kind of joined forces with the male labor organizations and the women were officers in these kind of joint operations so even you know long before they get the right to vote they really are showing incredible sort of pride and agency and kind of making some prospects some prospects for themselves and a little bit of progress kind of pushing against the kind of capital assist greed induced force somewhere along the line this is actually another reason why i think lowell was tidy local organization in lowell they're producing cotton and some of the speakers that they start to have you know at their their evening events are abolitionists 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 you know to help our brothers and sisters in the south and number two to kind of get ourselves out of this situation you know which is not which making other people money but isn't something that contributes to the world you know it's something that really takes away from it so that's sort of the arc that we use in the play and that that th message but what is the context of these no girls and the lives what will people experience all kinds of things that really kind of start takes you through the whole process how they learned about lol how they got to lol why they went to lol you know were they trying to seek more independence where their 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 or 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 the keep a sense of what it's like to be away from home because they're so connected to their homes with their their phones and e mail and and sort of all of that the world is a much more 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 through that communication with the people in your lives which was you know of media you know in the way that were accustomed to now we look at their romantic lives we actually have a character named delia who has an act one romance an act to 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 much more common part of people's lives in the one thousand sentry 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 and 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 eighteen lady two hundred forty s 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 capital lists 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 i think the the this will collage that i've made is all from primary sources it's all well ninety nine percent from things that actually people actually said that i've sort of put together into this context and i wondered you know i've 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 twenty years now and we've worked together on several productions he's 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 two thousand 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  interest in this and just availability in your schedule to do the work because you know it's sort of a lot of a lot of work that he's done to pull it all together and he thought i could i could i could get interested in that and his really been amazing in terms of using his expertise to kind of dig through you know materials that i wouldn't have thought of both popular songs and little known sort of jams that he has either found intact or things that he has found in adapted or taken poetry and set it to me music  or sometimes really you know to my mind creating 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 have this thing called the which was all of the stuff that we'd either caught 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 how things things and setting them to music and  finding ways to really knit the story together with the music does one character in the play delia the character who has the romantic troubles and she actually is based on a real person delia paige who is from new hampshire and went off to work in the local mills and what we have of delia is all 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 to 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 with 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 blended together with the letters and give with yeah yeah he has tom has been was just 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 accordion and his wife rentis who's also 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 and a banjo in the course of the show and then my husband stan baker will be playing the cello so we've got this 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 the whole balance sounds very exciting and it's going to start the you have five performances we have five yeah it's thursday friday saturday november to three and four and then the following friday and saturday which is the tenth and eleventh and all of the performances are at the mccarthy arts center on campus in colchester and free and open to the public primary collaborators and friends is a man named john paul devil and 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 the looks a whole lot like factory and that's been 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 heritage you ski mill museum and miriam block the director has been a great sponsor and couple of companies down there my web grocer has given a space for some performances we're going to actually hold in the mill for schoolchildren and then waterworks restaurant is doing promotion where if people were to attend go to waterworks on november second before they go to the play ten percent of the proceeds from the dinners would be contributed in the mill museum so that's really a great great kind of connection that they're forming that's great and we're going to publish the website in this further information and and those posters and things of that nature