“I remember once, my freshman year in high school, a senior cast-mate said to me on opening night, ‘Make sure that while you're out there, you take a second to actually look around and take in what's happening, because it will go by faster than you will believe.’ And that couldn't be more true, but I can also remember vividly each of those brief moments that I paused to register what was happening. They were incredible,” Margaret Sargent ’14 recalled.

As she gazed off into the distance, trying to articulate her most cherished memories, I was glad to be a part of this obviously very meaningful experience, if only for a brief moment.

Part of a “musical family,” as she describes, Margaret got started singing at a very young age for her loved ones. As she later began to participate in the chorus at school, she fell in love with the thrill of performing on stage. Before she knew it, she was writing her own music and performing at local coffee houses, in her hometown of Needham, Massachusetts.

It is through this love of singing that she discovered theater. She was intrigued by the challenge of portraying someone completely different, and she fell in love with the close-knit family she felt the theater community to be.

At no point during our conversation did Margaret sound like she was reflecting on work, rather the focus was always on bonds, always on happiness and fun.

She has played a variety of roles in a range of musicals, including West Side Story, Kiss Me Kate, How to Succeed in Business, Anything Goes, and Music Man.

Each required the absorption of a new character. She would often run through her script, trying to soak up the various nuances, and experiment with different gestures and tones, all while thinking through the frame of her character.

“There's a point where the lines stop just being words to memorize and start being something that someone is actually saying. It's not just you the actor saying lines; it's you the character talking,” she mused.

But it is not just this love of acting that draws Margaret to theater, it is the life-changing friends she has made and continues to make. “At the end of each musical season, I totally lost it, because I was no longer going to be working with the people that meant the most to me,” she said. “There is something about spending eight hours a day together in a theater during hell week that is absolutely irreplaceable.”

When she got to the Hill, she hoped to discover the same kind of stimulation. Her COOT leader suggested she sign up for Powder and Wig’s production of Little Shop of Horrors, a musical that was to be cast, choreographed, and put on in the short span of eight days. The familiarity of these daily rehearsals struck her, and she realized just how much she belonged to this group on campus.

She soon became a member of the Colby College Chorale, Powder and Wig, and the Broadway Musical Revue (BMR), involving herself in all things theatrical on campus. She decided to be a part of Powder and Wig’s production of, The Importance of Being Earnest, a play in which she played the character of Gwendolyn, a high-society floozy who was the love-interest of Jack Worthing.

She will be making her next theatrical appearance in The Laramie Project, a documentary-on-stage made up of about sixty characters  (played by eight actors), all of whom are being interviewed about the murder of Matthew Shepard and its impact on the town