MEXICO – Singer Dorrie Casey, pianist Deborah Coclanis and their colleague, actor Meredith Sause, will perform at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 25, at Meroby Middle School. The concert will benefit the Rumford Historical Society’s Mountain Valley High School scholarship fund.

Casey and Coclanis have been working together for several years. “We want to present music and poetry in a way that enhances the meaning and significance of both,” said Colcanis. “We want our programs to be entertaining, enlightening and, well, different.” Last year, the two women joined with Shakespeare & Originals Theatre Company, a theater group from Durham, N.C., in putting together an evening of Shakespearean scenes and song settings.

“The audience came in expecting a simple song recital,” said Casey. “They didn’t know what hit them!”

For the first part of this benefit program, Casey and Coclanis will present songs set to the poetry of Shakespeare, Robert Frost and Lucille Clifton.

“Song recitals usually concentrate on works by German, Italian and French composers,” said Casey, a native of Mexico and a graduate of Mexico High School. “But there are so many wonderful art songs available in English that rarely get performed. And there were – and are – so many fine composers writing in our native language.”

The second part of the evening will be devoted to a musical/theatrical telling of the life of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, a native of Rockland.

“At first, we were just going to do the song recital,” said Coclanis, “But then, when I was researching songs of New England poets, we came upon the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, and we hit upon the idea of concentrating on the work of just one poet, set in song by a variety of different composers.”

Casey, who’s been interested in the Millay’s life and work since high school, had just read Nancy Milford’s biography of Millay, “Savage Beauty,” which started her thinking along theatrical as well as musical lines.

Why not create a piece of musical theater, in which the music and drama together give a compact telling of the poet’s life? And why not let the poet tell her story in her own words, using not just her poetry, but writing such as her letters, as well?

“Deborah and I work well together,” said Casey. “She has advanced degrees in music as well as library science, so she is the perfect person to set loose in a music library. Since I am a theatrical type, as well as a singer, I can throw all the raw material she finds up in the air, sift and sort, cut and paste and, voila, a ‘script’ is born.”

Casey and Coclanis are both devotees of Sause’s stage work. “She is a perfect Edna,” says Coclanis. “We think the audience will agree!”

Admission will be by donation, suggested at $5 for adults and $2 for students.