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Her Name is Vincent
This fall, Magis is investigating the work and life of the American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay with a new piece called Her Name is Vincent. The work began with our interest in "Vincent" Millay's complex relationship with her sisters: close by necessity as children, but pulled apart by fame, competition and addiction. In the course of our work we discovered Vincent's early play Aria da Capo, written in the wake of the first World War and at the dawn of the avant-garde. We found striking parallels in her meditation upon conflict and greed and the issues that plagued her relationships during her adult life. Paired together, The Millay Sisters and Aria da Capo make a compelling evening of theatre. Her Name is Vincent will be performed this October in the heart of New York City's Theatre District just seven blocks from where Aria da Capo opened on Broadway in 1925.

Part 1, The Millay Sisters
Weaving in tunes from 1900 through the Jazz Age, The Millay Sisters invites you to join the cabaret and meet the sisters; the famous one, the charming one, and the one they left behind.
"I got positively sentimental the other night... I had the radio on - and three women were harmonizing - and I remembered those three Millay brats and how they used to sing together - you know Edna, I think I sometimes miss that more than any other thing in my whole life in the gay days of long ago! Do you ever miss the singing too?"
--Kathleen Millay, letter to her elder sister, Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Part 2, Aria da Capo
Millay's 1919 gem about love, war and greed.
"I was thrilled and troubled by this little play: it was the first time I had felt Edna's peculiar power. There was a bitter treatment of war, and we were all ironic about war; but there was also a less common sense of the incongruity and the cruelty of life, of the precariousness of love perched on a table above the corpses that had been hastily shoved out of sight, and renewing its eternal twitter in the silence that succeeded the battle."
--Edmund Wilson, writing about Aria da Capo, Epilogue 1952; Edna St. Vincent Millay