Word: millay
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...Lovely Light presents Actress Dorothy Stickney far removed from her most famous role. Where in Life with Father she played Mrs. Clarence Day Sr., an entrenched real-life bourgeoise, in her current one-woman show she half impersonates, half interprets Edna St. Vincent Millay, an unfettered real-life bohemian. With a minimum of stage props and commentary, Actress Stickney has woven an autobiographical chronicle out of Edna Millay's poems and letters, from her youthful dreaming in a Maine seacoast town through her Greenwich Village bohemian days and her married life with Eugen Boissevain to her solitary death...
...kind of tribute from one who greatly admired Poet Millay's work without knowing the author, A Lovely Light, helpfully directed by Actress Stickney's playwright husband Howard Lindsay, is also a pleasant theater piece. Mingling pert comment and factual color from the letters with the lyrical stresses, responses and longings of the poems, Actress Stickney nicely balances the mockingbird and the nightingale, the humorous down-to-earth snorts and the impassioned cries of a woman responding to nature, or in love, or not in love...
...actress has found ways to vary her performance, has managed not to sentimentalize and, once past Edna Millay's own cutie-cute period, offers rewarding poetry. It is a likable performance...
...Actress Stickney respects her material, her material restricts Poet Millay. Only glimpsed through chinks is that mingled poet and woman who during the 1920s crystallized an attitude and epitomized an era. Whether with her gaily illicit valentines or her often vibrant cris du coeur, Edna Millay reshaped romantic love into lyrical sex, was one moment a heartbreaker, the next moment heartbroken. She made unconventionality chic, but could also, as in picketing for Sacco and Vanzetti, make protest resonant. There was something of a distaff Byron, about her, and on the stage of the '20s she was one kind...
...Lovely Light the candle burtis at one end only, and so ladylike that it could grace a dinner table. The important thing is less that many piquant and pertinent facts in Edna Millay's story are lacking as that, because they are, there is lacking a kind of glowing fiction-and a whole period legend...