By Robert St. Martin
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 7/2/25 – One of the delightful treats at this year’s Hollywood Fringe Festival is a one-woman show entitled Bela Lugosi Meets Edna St. Vincent Millay – written by award-winning playwright Jordan R. Young and starring the acclaimed and award-nominated actress Rose London. I was most fortunate to attend the production on Saturday June 28 at the Broadwater Theatre in Hollywood. This hour-long play spins a zany, improbably tale about Bela Lugosi (1882-1956), the iconic star of Dracula,and Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet of the Jazz Age. This play penned by Jordan R. Young features an actress who has been called upon by a friend to help write a one-woman show about Edna St. Vincent Millay. That actress was, in real life, Betty Ackerman, best known for her role in the ABC medical drama Ben Casey as Dr. Maggie Graham (1961-1966).
As the story unfolds, Betty Ackerman was hoping that her husband actor Sam Jaffe, also from Ben Casey fame could approach director Ted Post to direct such a play with Ackerman as Edna St. Vincent Millay. In this tale recounted by Rose London, Betty asked our lead character played by Rose London to help her with that plan. That is the germ of the play, but it becomes more complex – as Rose attempts to cobble together what is known about Edna St. Vincent Millay. In the process, she stumbles a contemporary in theatre and film – none other than Bela Lugosi, the Hungarian-born actor who ended up in Hollywood as a major star in Gothic films. They were both at the peak of their careers in the 1920s but eventually fell out of favor as cultural tastes shifted and their luminosity faded. The recounting of the lives of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Bela Lugosi as staged by director Christine Cummings and the energetic and engaging stage presence of actress Rose London.
Although the two probably never actually met, it seems possible that their paths could have crossed in the late 1920s. Actress Rose London invites us into a quick review of the highlights of the life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. She was born in Rockland, Maine, and her mother raised Edna and her two sisters and encourage Edna’s literary pursuit from an early age. Encouraged to read the classics at home, she was too rebellious to make a success of formal education, but she won poetry prizes from an early age.
Millay went to New York in the fall of 1917, gave some poetry readings, and refused an offer of a comfortable job as secretary to a wealthy woman. Kennerley published her first book, Renascence, and Other Poems and in December she secured a part in socialist Floyd Dell’s play The Angel Intrudes, which was being presented by the Provincetown Players in Greenwich Village.
Millay was soon involved with Dell in a love affair, one that continued intermittently until late 1918, when he was charged with obstructing the war effort. Millay engaged in affairs with several different men and women, and her relationship with Dell disintegrated. Although sympathetic with socialist hopes “of a free and equal society,” as she told Grace Hamilton King in an interview included in The Development of the Social Consciousness of Edna St. Vincent Millay as Manifested in Her Poetry, Millay never became a Communist. However, her works reflect the spirit of nonconformity that imbued her Greenwich Village milieu.
In 1920 Millay’s poems began to appear in Vanity Fair, a magazine that struck a note of sophistication. Two of its editors, John Peale Bishop and Edmund Wilson, became Millay’s suitors, and in August Wilson formally proposed marriage. Unwilling to subside into a domesticity that would curtail her career, she put him off.
Refusing the marriage proposals of three of her literary contemporaries, Millay wed Eugen Jan Boissevain, a Dutch businessman, in July of 1923. In May 1925, he purchased a run-down, seven-hundred-acre farm in the Berkshire foothills near the village of Austerlitz, New York. During this period Millay suffered severe headaches and altered vision. The years between 1923 and 1927 were largely devoted to marriage, travel, the move to the old farm Millay called Steepletop, and the composition of her libretto.
In August of 1927, however, Millay became involved in the Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti case. On August 22, she was arrested, with many others, for picketing the State House in Boston, protesting the execution of the Italian anarchists convicted of murder. Convinced, like thousands of others, of a miscarriage of justice, and frustrated at being unable to move Governor Fuller to exercise mercy, Millay later said that the case focused her social consciousness. Until the advent of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich in 1933 she had remained a fervent pacifist. But the attacks of the Japanese, the Nazis, and the Italians upon their neighbors, together with both the German Russian treaty of August 23, 1939, and the start of World War II, combined to change her views.
All this is covered in bits and bobs by actress Rose London. The issue of social activism is where the parallel biography of Bela Lugosi interweaves. Bela Lugosi began acting on the Hungarian stage in 1902, appearing in more than a hundred productions. Beginning in 1917, he performed in Hungarian silent films. After the failed Hungarian Communist Revolution of 1919, Lugosi was forced to immigrate to Germany due to his socialist activities. He acted in several films in Weimar Germany, before arriving in New Orleans as a seaman on a merchant ship, then making his way north to New York City and Ellis Island.
In 1927, he starred as Count Dracula in a Broadway adaptation of Bram Stocker’s novel, moving with the play to the West Coast in 1928 and settling down in Hollywood. He later starred in the 1931 film version of Dracula directed by Tod Browning and produced by Universal Pictures. Through the 1930s, he occupied an important niche in horror films, but his notoriety as Dracula and thick Hungarian accent greatly limited the roles offered to him, and he unsuccessfully tried for years to avoid typecasting.
The Horace Liveright production of Dracula was successful, running in New York City for 261 performances before touring the United States to much fanfare and critical acclaim throughout 1928 and 1929. It is entirely possible that Edna St. Vincent Millay, living in New York, may have attended a production and seen Bela Lugosi on stage.
In 1928, Lugosi decided to stay in California when the play ended its first West Coast run. In 1929, with no other film roles in sight, he returned to the stage as Dracula for a short West Coast tour of the play. Lugosi remained in California where he resumed his film work under contract with Fox, appearing in early talkies often as a heavy or an “exotic” sheik.
During the Great Depression, Lugosi played an active role in the Screen Actors Guild. As a SAG founding member, he served on the union’s advisory board. Lugosi organized for the union on the set of The Raven, which co-starred Boris Karloff, a SAG member who was famous for portraying Frankenstein’s monster, in 1935.
By World War II, Hungarian dictator Miklos Horthy allied with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. In opposition, Lugosi helped form the Hungarian-American Council for Democracy, calling for “Nazism to be wiped out everywhere.” As a member of American-Hungarian Relief Inc., Lugosi was a keynote speaker at an Aug. 28, 1944, rally in Los Angeles. He demanded Washington rescue Hungarian Jewish refugees, pressure Horthy’s Nazi-puppet regime and easing immigration restrictions.
There is a lot of history packed in his one-hour play written by Jordan R. Young, whose plays have been produced in Hollywood and Off Off Broadway. He is an excellent researcher of film history and has written books like Spike Jones Off the Record, Acting Solo, Reel Characters, The Laugh Crafters: Comedy Writing in Radio and TV’s Golden Age, and The Beckett Actor. Other e-books by Young include including John Ford’s The Quiet Man: The Making of a Cult Classic, Dali,Disney and Destiny, King Vidor’s The Crowd: The Making of a Silent Classic, Academy Award Losers 1912-1939, Laurel & Hardy Meet Samuel Beckett, and Stand-up and Solo Performance.
This one-woman performance by Rose London is remarkable in its brilliant narration of the stories of two fascinating people who in very different ways represent the arc of artistic achievement in New York in the 1920s.
