Final curtain call: Peter Harrigan revisits ‘Mill Girls’ as his last St. Mike’s production

As the Saint Michael’s College McCarthy Arts Center celebrates its 50th anniversary, Peter Harrigan, professor of Fine Arts and Theater, prepares to celebrate his own milestone: his last production at St. Mike’s before retirement. 

This fall, Harrigan will be returning to his 2017 production of Mill Girls, an original play that he spent years putting together. 

“It’s been kind of a long-term project for me,” Harrigan said. “I’ve been involved in directing several plays that were documentary-style theater, where an author has pulled together information to piece together a story. And I thought it might be interesting to do something like that myself.” 

This year’s production of Mill Girls will run from Nov. 5 to 8 at 7 p.m. each evening in the McCarthy Arts Center Mainstage Theatre. The play is free and open to the public, but tickets must be reserved in advance.

Mill Girls was born in the fall of 2016 while Harrigan was completing a semester-long sabbatical. While he originally intended to research and write the play around the mills near campus in Winooski, Harrigan soon discovered a lack of historical documentation. Instead, he pivoted to researching the textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, where there was much more information available. 

The original cast of “Mill Girls” during the play’s debut in 2017. (File photo)

Harrigan’s research revealed an abundance of first-hand accounts from young women working in the textile mills during the early 1800s. 

“In our young country, there was more industry than there were workers,” Harrigan said. “Smart men who wanted to make money thought, ‘Oh, if we could get women to work, then that could solve the problem.’ They went about creating these really appealing places where women might like to go and where their fathers would permit them to go.”

The areas surrounding many of these mills included libraries, churches, and lecture halls, providing educational and social benefits to the women who worked there. 

“They were encouraged to spend their leisure time growing intellectually and spiritually,” Harrigan said. “As a result of that, they did a lot of writing, and the writings were gathered and published.” 

Some of these essays and poems were published in a journal called The Lowell Offering, which became essential in Harrigan’s understanding of the workers’ daily lives and the creation of Mill Girls. 

“There really was a whole lot of material from 1826 up until the Civil War,” Harrigan said. “I felt like I hit a gold mine. It was also just very exciting to me, because I didn’t know about any of this.” 

Harrigan collaborated with composer Tom Cleary to create original music for the production,  bringing the voices of the mill girls to life. Together, they created a production that blends music with a historical narrative. 

The original cast of “Mill Girls” during the play’s debut at Saint Michael’s College in 2017. (File photo)

Revisiting the play 

This semester will be the first time that Mill Girls has been produced on the Saint Michael’s stage since 2017. 

“My job is not about directing the same play every year,” Harrigan said. “So, we took a little time in between. We decided that once the students who were involved in it have graduated, maybe we’ll revisit it again.” 

Unfortunately, Harrigan and Cleary’s plan to reproduce the play in 2020 was derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The 2025 cast of “Mill Girls” pose in Winooski near former mill buildings. (Photo by Sophie Burt ’26)

With live theater back and running five years later, Harrigan and his cast are officially ready to put Mill Girls back on the main stage. The 2025 production will include many similar design elements from the 2017 show, including costumes and set elements. 

“We are maintaining a lot of the stuff,” Harrigan said. “The set is the same set design, minus some elements that we weren’t really satisfied with.” 

He added, “Most of the costumes that the mill girls wore in 2017 were actually kind of repurposed from a production of The Crucible in 2015. Some of these things are on their fourth show, so we’re trying to spruce them up and make them work.”

History in the present 

Despite Mill Girls taking place more than two centuries ago, Harrigan believes the themes of their stories continue to resonate in 2025. 

“I hope it helps [the audience] think more about the possibilities in this world,” Harrigan said. “In this case, these industrialists started out doing something that helped them and helped other people by creating this outlet for these young women. But then, eventually, they lost sight of the benevolent part of it and just focused on the financial part of it.” 

Harrigan sees parallels between the early days of industrialization outlined in the play and today’s world, posing questions about the intersection of labor and equity. 

 “I hope it brings us all back to our humanity and goodness,” he said. “This story makes us realize how important the way we treat each other is, and if we’re in situations where we have some control, we also have responsibility.” 

Peter Harrigan

The show also examines the complex relationships among gender, class, and race. Harrigan explained that some of the cotton being processed by the mill girls in New England was picked by enslaved Black women in the South. 

“The young women, as they started to feel exploited by their employers, and as their political consciousness grew, they were aware of that,” he said. “They knew that they were part of a cycle of oppression.” 

Harrigan hopes that today’s students and audiences find the play humorous, as well as educational and uplifting. 

“There’s humor and joy in the show, too,” he said. “I want people to enjoy it and to think more about the world we live in.”

The final act 

Closing out his career with a final production of Mill Girls feels especially fitting to Harrigan. Harrigan himself is a 1983 graduate of Saint Michael’s College, and he has been teaching in the Fine Arts Department since 1991.

“Since I came [to Saint Michael’s], we’ve done a lot of plays that were mission-centered and related to the world that we’d like to see, as opposed to the one that we’re living in,” he said. 

For Harrigan, this process of coaching students in an “imagination laboratory” to bring a show to life is exactly what he will miss most about teaching theater at Saint Michael’s. 

“It’s kind of a magical thing,” he said. “Sometimes I can’t believe I get paid to do it.” 

General admission for Mill Girls is free, but tickets must be reserved in advance. Find tickets here.>>