STAGE REVIEW : “Millay--Poet, Pianist” Chronicle Makes for Charming Theater Evening

Edna St. Vincent Millay was a poet, first of all. But she was much more, as playwright Leigh Kaplan points out in her play “Millay--Poet, Pianist” at Long Beach Playhouse’s Studio Theatre.

Millay was also a musician (she wrote the libretto for a Deems Taylor opera) and an actress who appeared professionally at Greenwich Village’s Provincetown Playhouse. She was one of the colorful creative personalities who gave the Village its many-splendored reputation in the two decades after World War I.

“Millay” is a charming evening. On the way into the theater on opening night, one audience member said: “I can’t wait to see this--Millay was a very strange woman.” Vincent, as she was known to friends, is not all that odd in this production. Kaplan, who also plays Vincent, doesn’t paint her subject in those colors.

In fact, we don’t find out much about what made her tick, what drove her and what made her translate her experiences into some of the most affecting poetry of the first half of the 20th Century.

Kaplan’s script is chronicle in form--events in Millay’s life race by so quickly that Kaplan and her audience never have the time to stop and take a good look at her.

To repeat, it is a charming evening, made so by the fluid, theatrical direction of Robert G. Leigh, the sepia-toned setting by Pavel T. Vogler, Trish Farnsworth’s painterly lighting and the exquisitely correct period costumes by Lyn Coulter.

The performances are across-the-board refreshing and suffer only from writing that merely skims the surface of events, and the fact that most of what they say is directed as narrative to the audience.

Kaplan is endearing as Vincent and leaves one feeling that if Kaplan the writer had been more open, so would Kaplan the actress.

Louise Moore, as Millay’s sister Norma, holds the show together as prime narrator and is a delight, particularly when the sisters entertain at a party, singing and dancing Harry B. Smith’s “Maud (The Girl Who Studied Abroad).”

Margaret Middleton gives tone to the role of the woman who got Vincent her Vassar scholarship. Robert Green and John Ross Clark are stalwart as men in her life, as is Linda Bisesti as a woman in her life (and the woman who took her first love away). In her brief appearance, daCe Broc is strong as a woman who spent two months in the 1930s working for the ailing Vincent and her husband, Eugene.

‘Millay--Poet, Pianist’

A Long Beach Playhouse production of the Leigh Kaplan play. Directed by Robert G. Leigh. With Leigh Kaplan, Louise Moore, Margaret Middleton, Robert Green, John Ross Clark, Linda Bisesti and daCe Broc. Set: Pavel T. Vogler. Sound: Justus Matthews. Lighting: Trish Farnsworth. Costumes: Lyn Coulter. At the Studio Theatre, Long Beach Playhouse, 5021 E. Anaheim St., Long Beach. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; matinees Sunday and Feb. 28, 2 p.m. Ends March 13. $10; (310) 494-1616. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.