Sunday, November 7th: “Every Broom and Bridget—Emily Dickinson and Her Servants”

“Every Broom and Bridget—Emily Dickinson and Her Servants,” a play by Boston-area poet and educator Tom Daley, will be performed as a one-man show by the author on Saturday, November 7, 2009 at 2:30 pm at the Chelmsford Public Library, Main Branch, 25 Boston Road, Chelmsford, MA 01824. There is no admission charge. The library’s telephone number is (978) 256-5521. For directions, go to the library’s website.

http://www.chelmsfordlibrary.org/library_info/directions/index.html.

This performance is co-sponsored by the Lowell Poetry Network.

The play is narrated by the character Tom Kelley, an Irish-born Dickinson family groundskeeper whom Emily Dickinson appointed her chief pallbearer. It explores, with humor and satire, the relationship between Emily Dickinson, her upper crust Yankee Protestant family, and their servants, many of whom were recent immigrants from Ireland. Woven throughout the dialogue, poems and letter excerpts by Dickinson are complemented with excerpts from communications from the Dickinsons’ Irish housekeeper, Margaret Maher; Emily Dickinson’s friend and posthumous editor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson; and others. Much of the play is informed by research done by Dickinson scholars Aífe Murray and Jay Leyda.

In a letter to the author after the original production of the play, Judson Evans, director of the Department of Liberal Arts at the Boston Conservatory, wrote, “By grounding Dickinson in a dense social context among the Irish servants who surrounded her, you open up the layers and dimensions of social imagination within her work that are denied by the conventional image of Dickinson’s total interiority and reclusion. You allow her poems to unfold new dimensions of social gesture, irony, and exchange. You create an imaginative space in which Dickinson’s poems can be dramatically spoken as complex authentic communication without this seeming stilted or arcane. By presenting a posthumous Dickinson alive in the multiple memories of the servants who surrounded her you avoid reducing her to a poetic cliché and instead preserve the mystery and otherness of her identity.”

For information on how to book this one-man show at your school, library, or community venue, contact Tom Daley at tom.daley2@verizon.net