Eugene O’Neill: Superpersonalisation and Racial Spectacularism

Playwright Eugene O’Neill jumpstarted his career and had his first major successes in and from the little art colony in Provincetown; this chapter focuses on O’Neill, the Provincetown Players’ most prominent member, who lived and worked there between 1916 and 1922. The chapter shows how the compressed scale and distinctive mobility of Provincetown’s creative community was crucial to O’Neill’s success. There, O’Neill was exposed to the art colony’s distinctive amalgamation of modern and experimental theatre practices, including those dealing with writing, staging, and promotion. His own work built upon these: he was especially adept at harvesting, adapting, and exporting these practices from the rural outpost to the metropolitan hub of modernist activity in New York. This chapter argues that the formal and topical elements of O’Neill’s notorious play The Emperor Jones (conceived and written in Provincetown), along with its production and promotional strategies, were distinctive to the little art colony. There, O’Neill cultivated and marketed to a ‘special audience,’ drew topical inspiration from long-simmering racial anxieties in the region, and expanded upon the Provincetown Players’ theatrical practice of superpersonalization: a writing and staging strategy that amplifies the bleed between character and actor in order to heighten the audience’s engagement in the play. These strategies kindled his white audience’s ‘racial feelings’: a move that brought the relatively unknown O’Neill into the national and international public consciousness and created a still-resonant sensation about his work.

“It’s Just a Matter of Form”: Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Experiments with Masculinity

Edna St. Vincent Millay occupies an uncomfortable position in relation to modernism. In the majority of criticism, her work is considered the antithesis to modernist experimentation: as representative of the ‘rearguard’ that rejected vers libre in favour of fixed poetic forms. Indeed, most critics concur that whilst Millay’s subject matter may have been modern and daring—voicing women’s sexual independence, for instance—her form was decidedly traditional. Millay also troubles notions of modernist impersonality by writing seemingly autobiographical lyrics that showcase feminine emotions. In this paper, I aim to challenge this view of Millay by focussing on the two avant-garde works that mark the outset and the zenith of her career: Aria da Capo (1921) and Conversation at Midnight (1937). These works are both formally innovative, blurring the boundaries between poetry and drama, causing Edmund Wilson to complain that Millay had “gone to pieces”. Moreover, both works engage in performances of masculinity, with women all but absent. Aria da Capo, first performed by the Provincetown Players in 1919, dramatizes the conflict between two shepherds as an allegory for the First World War. Conversation ventriloquises an all-male dinner party, ranging through the political issues of the Depression era and foreshadowing the war to come. I use both works to argue that Millay has a more interesting relationship to masculinity and modernism than has been hitherto captured by critics. Millay voices men in innovative ways, radically challenging constructions of both gender and poetic form in the process.

Humor, ironía y actualidad en la dramaturgia de Susan Glaspell

Reseña crítica de Nieves Alberola Crespo, Susan Glaspell y los Provincetown Players. Laboratorio de emociones (1915-1917), ISBN: 9788491340829, Valencia, Publicaciones de la Universidad de Valencia, 2017, 180 pp.

American Communist Idealism in George Cram Cook’s The Athenian Women (1918)

The Athenian Women, written by the American George Cram Cook with input from Susan Glaspell, is a serious, substantial play drawing chiefly on Lysistrata and Thesmophoriazusae. It premiered on March 1st 1918 with the Provincetown Players. Cook was convinced of parallels between the Peloponnesian War and World War I. He believed there had been communists in Periclean Athens comparable to those who were making strides in Russia (in 1922 to become the USSR) and the socialists in America, amongst whom he and Glaspell counted themselves. The paper examines the text and production contexts of The Athenian Women, traces its relationships with several different ancient Greek authors including Thucydides as well as Aristophanes, and identifies the emphatically stated socialist and feminist politics articulated by the two main ‘proto-communist’ characters, Lysicles and Aspasia. Although the play was not particularly successful, its production had a considerable indirect impact on the future directions taken by left-wing theatre in the USA, through the subsequent dramas of Glaspell and Eugene O’Neill for the Provincetown Players.

Glaspell, Susan (1876–1948)

Susan Glaspell shaped the development of American Modernism not only as an award-winning author but also as a founding member of the Provincetown Players, the groundbreaking theater company that nurtured other American modernists such as Eugene O’Neill. Although she spent most of her career on the East Coast, Glaspell hailed from Davenport, Iowa, and attended Drake University in Des Moines. While still a teenager, she began working in journalism; after college, she joined the staff of the Des Moines Daily News, covering the State Legislature and criminal trials. Glaspell also began to write short fiction and soon decided to pursue creative writing exclusively, publishing her first novel, The Glory of the Conquered (1909), while continuing to place stories in leading magazines.

The Provincetown Players (1915–1922)

Founded in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1915 and transplanted to Greenwich Village in 1916, the Provincetown Players was one of the most influential theatrical organizations in American theater history. Their membership was a veritable who’s who of the era’s leading political and cultural revolutionaries, including its spiritus rector, socialist writer George Cram (Jig) Cook; postimpressionist artists William and Marguerite Zorach and Bror Nordfeldt; labor journalists John Reed and Mary Heaton Vorse; modernist poets Wallace Stevens, Alfred Kreymborg, Mina Loy, and Edna St Vincent Millay; New Stagecraft pioneers Robert Edmond Jones and Cleon Throckmorton; and more than fifty playwrights whose dramaturgical innovations defied contemporary critical description. In addition to formal experimentation, Provincetown playwrights were noted for their frank treatment of such topical issues as racial, ethnic, and religious Otherness, class conflict, war, and changing gender and sexual mores. Their plays manifested the most current trends in the era’s intellectual discourse: Freudian and Jungian psychology; Nietzschean challenges to traditional morality; Havelock Ellis’s and Ellen Keys’ ideas on egalitarian sexual and marital relationships; the social theories of Karl Marx and Edward Carpenter; the feminism of Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, and Crystal Eastman; and the parenting techniques of Maria Montessori.

Little Theater Movement

The Little Theater Movement comprised a web of amateur theater activities undertaken across much of the United States between 1912 and 1925. Little Theater opposed commercialism; its proponents believed that theater could be used for the betterment of American society and for self-expression. Little Theater founders and participants included playwrights, professors, liberal political activists, social workers, lawyers, heiresses, poets, actors, aesthetes, journalists, housewives, and students. They drew inspiration from the best-known work of the European Independent Theater Movement and from the design aesthetics of Adolphe Appia, Edward Gordon Craig, and Max Reinhardt. Eventually their values affected commercial theatre. The Little Theater Movement is best known for four of its earliest companies: the Provincetown Players, the Washington Square Players, the Chicago Little Theater, and the Neighborhood Playhouse. No two of these were alike, suggesting the breadth and variety of the movement’s undertakings. The Provincetown Players started in 1915, when a group of New York-based writers and activists assembled at their summer beach haunt in Massachusetts to present short, original plays. The founders were idealist George Cram Cook and his writer wife, Susan Glaspell; the group is perhaps best known for giving Eugene O’Neill his start as a produced playwright. The Washington Square Players was also started by a group of iconoclastic New Yorkers. The WSP’s mission was not, however, the production of member-written, American plays, but rather the production of a variety of plays from many sources.