Via Community News Service, a University of Vermont journalism internship for the Winooski News
COLCHESTER — “Mill Girls,” a play by Peter Harrigan, returned to Saint Michael’s College in early November, almost 10 years since it first premiered.
The Mainstage Theatre Production lands close to home for another reason; it is inspired by the rich history of the young women who worked in mills across New England, especially in Winooski, Vermont and Lowell, Massachusetts.
The restaging of the play carries significance for Harrigan — playwright, director and Saint Michael’s theatre professor —as it marks his final production with the school before his retirement.
Originally from New Hampshire, Harrigan grew up living throughout New England. He graduated from Saint Michael’s College in 1983, where he studied Theater and English.
“My parents, luckily, supported me and drove me to different opportunities to be involved in theater, in workshops, or actually in plays,” Harrigan said. “It was always sort of a secret passion of mine. Not so secret, but also not something that I pictured would become a career.”
Harrigan wrote “Mill Girls” while on a sabbatical in 2016. He was inspired by the Champlain Mills in Winooski and searched for reliable primary source material to develop a play. However, he found that most historical documents regarding the female mill workers came from Lowell, Massachusetts.
Harrigan used the letters he found, written by the mill girls, as well as essays and poems originally published in “The Lowell Offering” — a monthly periodical from 1840 to 1845 — to craft the story. Eventually, he collaborated with composer Tom Cleary to write the music for the show.
“One of (“Mill Girls’”) real uniquenesses and strengths is that it does have characters, but the group, the entire cast, is more important than any one character,” said Cleary.
“Mill Girls” follows a group of girls in Lowell, Massachusetts, as they experience life working in the cotton mills. It describes their working conditions, housing conditions and the implications of unequal power between overseers and workers.
Most of the girls had left their homes and traveled to Lowell to provide for their families.
“These women were really ahead of their time in terms of who they were and what they were asking for,” Harrigan said.
The show doesn’t focus on one main character. Instead, it touches on the unique stories of 11 girls.
The show was first produced in the fall of 2017 and ran for a few performances at St. Michael’s. The original piece attracted major audiences, growing into something of a local phenomenon, Harrigan said.
According to Harrigan, the original 2017 production got an enormous amount of publicity from Vermont Public Radio, Burlington Free Press and Seven Days.
“Around here, for whatever reason, if you’re doing ‘Hello, Dolly!’, nobody notices,” Harrigon said. “People are very interested in things that are social, political and historical, and this was all of those things.”
Three years later, Harrigan and Cleary decided to put on “Mill Girls” again with a new group of actors. However, the pandemic got in the way, and they ended up producing a virtual version of the show instead.
Cleary said they “found their way through the dark” of turning a stage production into a virtual production. They focused on adding new songs to the show to provide more entertainment and context.
One of the songs they added in 2020 was “Flower Picking Day,” which Cleary had written as a solo piece for a student to learn remotely during the pandemic.
But in this year’s production, “Flower Picking Day” became a group number, emphasizing the collective nature of the show.
That change is just one of many Harrigan and Cleary made for the most recent production. They streamlined the show, trimming songs and scenes to create more time for rehearsal.
“We’re still kind of in that post-pandemic, ‘maybe I’d rather stay home’ kind of mode,” Harrigan said. “So being able to coax people out of the house, having a more compact experience for them, an hour and a half, no intermission, that’s appealing to me as an audience member.”
Set centuries ago, “Mill Girls” explores themes that remain relevant today, including gender inequality and workers’ rights.
“A lot of people come up to me afterwards nodding their heads and saying, ‘Yeah, a lot of that stuff is still a thing,’” Harrigan said.
Harrigan hopes that audiences can recognize the amazing things that women were doing that are so often not celebrated. Students involved with the show have also been able to resonate with the themes.
“Having that takeaway of how impactful shows can be when they are using words from underrepresented voices, as well as directly addressing the audience, was something that I wasn’t necessarily expecting,” said Amanda Lyons, a Saint Michael’s student and the show’s lead electrician.
“Mill Girls” holds significance for both the community and Harrigan. As he approaches retirement, Harrigan looks forward to leaning into his hobbies and spending time with his dog, Ginger. Harrigan said he hopes to find ways to stay involved in local theatre initiatives.
From a student perspective, Lyons discussed how, in Harrigan’s class, she was able to learn about the process of creating new work by watching clips from Harrigan’s past productions.
“We had a whole class discussing how it evolved and why he made some of the choices to cut down certain parts or why he and Tom added in some new songs and things like that, of how fluid writing can be,” Lyons said.
Harrigan’s 34 years in the theater department are marked by his directing contributions, including multiple productions of “Mill Girls” and his consistent emphasis on supporting performers while refining their work.
“Peter is pretty special for the way that he is so positive,” Cleary said. “You have to be critical when you’re a director, but you have to balance supporting what’s good and patiently work on the things you want to change. He makes everybody shine.”