Currently Reading Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay By Nancy Milford see related

Currently directing a play about Edna St. Vincent Millay.  Challenge is to make the play even half as interesting as her life.  What a case--this girl had more lovers than Google has web pages.  That life has a way of wearing you out though.  My wife has a good old Ozark hill country phrase for people who don't look so hot--"She looks like she's been rode hard and put away wet."  That's pretty much what Edna looked like by the time she got to be around 40.  She could sure write poetry though.  Read "Renascence" to find out  why she was a national celebrity at 20 (hard to imagine a poet as a national celebrity).

Art about art.  A play about a poet.  Last play I directed was Picasso at the Lapin Agile, with Picasso and Elvis as major characters.  At least Einstein was in that one too.  Is it becasue artists feel isolated from the rest of society that we write so much about ourselves?  What makes artists tend to be such . . . goofballs in their personal lives.  Does genius creativity and bankrupt morality go together?  Actually, the artists I work with are, most of them, moral people, caring and supportive.  In contrast to the celebrity-driven Hollywood culture of scandal and silliness, community arts people just want to do what they're good at in the company of others who want to do the same thing.  Thus *community* theatre.  But Edna sure was a case.