The Light in the Mill

The time is 1843, and the play that is about to begin has a rich authentic sense of reaching into another time and place for a dramatic involvement in an absorbing mystery that's about to unfold. The play opens in pre-dawn shadows when a body is carried on stage and hidden in a storage area of a cloth repair room in a New England textile mill. The intruder flees as a group of millgirls arrive for work, grieving over the recent, mysterious drowning of a co-worker, beautiful Magda Thorn. Magda's seemingly unmoved mother arrives at the mill to demand money from her daughter's supervisor. What is the secret "arrangement" between the supervisor and the dead girl's mother? Then it's discovered that Magda's grave has been robbed. The possibility of her ghost haunting the mill throws some of the millgirls into hysteria. There is a desperate confrontation when the body is discovered, revealing even more long-buried, shocking secrets, and ending in yet another death. The nonstop action builds to a thundering and disturbing climax.