For Immediate Release – September 9, 2025
Debra Miller to Perform Her Portrayal of Louisa May Alcott at Mattoon Public Library
MATTOON — Professional actress Debra Miller will perform her portrayal of Louisa May Alcott at 1:30 p.m. Sept. 18 in the Community Room in the lower basement of the Mattoon Public Library. The performance is free to the public.
Miller has more than 30 years of experience as a performer for live audiences, television and film. She developed a series of 45-minute performances about significant women in history, of which the Alcott portrayal is one.
Regarding Alcott, Miller writes: “Poet and author, abolitionist and nurse, patriot and suffragist; Louisa May Alcott was so much more than the author of Little Women. In this 45-minute performance, the audience meets with this prolific American author at the height of her health and success. We learn of the hopes, the heartbreaks, and the experiences of Louisa May Alcott’s life from which she drew inspiration for her novels, short stories, and poems.”
This is the second performance by Miller at the Mattoon library in recent years (the first was a portrayal of Agatha Christie).
“Miller’s performance on Agatha Christie attracted a good audience and received excellent reviews,” library Director Carl Walworth said. “Several of the attendees encouraged us to bring her back, so when this opportunity arose, it was easy to decide to bring this performance to our community.”
Through their very personal letters and journals, and the published texts of their literary works and speeches, Miller weaves the words and lives of her women into performances that delight and inform. Miller’s exquisite costume, script, and talent give voice once more to these Historical Women of Letters.
Miller graduated from Michigan State University’s Department of Theater in 1985. Miller has toured the country with such prestigious children’s theater companies as Artreach, now the children’s theater of Cincinnati, and Child’s Play Touring Theatre. Since 1997, she’s traveled with Michael Krebs of Lincoln Production as one of nation’s more controversial first ladies, Mary Todd Lincoln.
In 2010 she began creating her own company focused on writing and producing one-woman plays in which she portrays the important historical figures such as authors Jane Austen, Beatrix Potter, Mary Shelley, Louisa May Alcott, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as well as a one-woman performance as Mary Todd Lincoln entitled Mrs. Lincoln’s Salon.
Miller still works in the Chicago Theatres; most recently she starred in A Midwinter Mummers Tale, and In the Observarium for Terra Mysterium Theatre, Flanagan’s Wake at the Noble Fool Theater, and as Rose Kennedy in Chicago Dramatist’s production of Rosemary at the Tony Award-winning Victory Gardens Theatre. Miller won Best Actress in the 2004 Chicago Indiefest for her performance in her first film, Zen Noir.
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