The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity (review)

In the late Fall of 1916, the young physician and aspiring poet William Carlos Williams, married four years earlier and now establishing himself in a busy medical practice in Rutherford, New Jersey, traveled by train several times a week to MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village where, as an amateur actor, he was in rehearsals as one of three performers (the Husband) in the poet and editor Alfred Kreymborg's short verse play, Lima Beans. The other actors in this Provincetown Players' "inaugural" New York production were the writer Mina Loy (the Wife) and the sculptor William Zorach (the Huckster). Kreymborg's work, subtitled "A Scherzo Play in One Act," was scheduled to be on a bill that included Before Breakfast, by the young Eugene O'Neill, and Two Sons, by Neith Boyce. Zorach designed the minimalist set, which cost $2.50.

In a passage in Williams's Autobiography, partially quoted by Brenda Murphy in her comprehensive new book, The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity, Williams recalls that the experience was "tough," but termed the three performances (Murphy incorrectly quotes Williams as saying there were five) in December a "qualified success" (A 138–39). Kreymborg, according to Murphy, was more enthusiastic, remembering with pleasure a December 1 opening night with "wild applause and sixteen curtain calls" (Provincetown Players 108). Murphy calls Lima Beans an "epithalamium," a kind of "bridal song" or "parable about marital forbearance" (109–10), and it is that, although the helter-skelter free verse debate about whether string beans or lima beans should be served to the Husband for dinner is in truth only a modest dramatic exercise. Nonetheless, Williams, hopeful about the establishment of a new kind of drama, wrote that perhaps here "lay the future" (A 138).

Murphy's book chronicles in thorough and sometimes complicated detail the history and pivotal role that the Provincetown Players had in shaping not only the future of experimental American theatre in the early part of the twentieth century, but also the importance of the Players in helping to create what Murphy terms a "self-conscious modernist aesthetic" (xv). Among other things, that aesthetic celebrated what Murphy calls "non-representational art," including "fragmentation of the narrative trajectory," "the abstraction of some characters into types or symbolic figures," and "the theatrical equivalent of 'stream of consciousness' in fiction" (xvi). Of course, the playwright who would become most closely associated with the Provincetown Players, Eugene O'Neill, practiced this aesthetic in many of his plays. But in the very early years, many of the poets and artists associated with Kreymborg's journal Others were also drawn to this unofficial "movement," including Williams, Maxwell Bodenheim, Wallace Stevens, Djuna Barnes and later Edna St. Vincent Millay. And echoes of that aesthetic survived for decades in the fringes of American theatre, most strikingly in Julian Beck's and Judith Malina's Living Theatre in the late 1950s and beyond. It is interesting to note that Williams's own unorthodox verse play, Many Loves, was produced by the Living Theatre in New York in 1959, and ran intermittently in repertory over the next three years.

As Murphy writes, the origins of the Provincetown Players were anything but auspicious. In July of 1915, a group of writers, artists, activists and hangers-on, drawn together while summering in Provincetown, at the very tip of Cape Cod, decided to mount a single evening of theatre on the veranda of the home of Boyce and her journalist/anarchist friend Hutchins Hapgood. Two short plays were chosen: Constancy, by Boyce, and Suppressed Desires, co-authored by Susan Glaspell, already gaining a reputation as a writer of fiction, and professor and utopian George ("Jig") Cram Cook. According to Murphy, Constancy was a two-character "Shavian discussion play" about marriage; Suppressed Desires was a short satire on the new fashion of Freudian psychoanalysis. Modest though this amateur effort was, Murphy writes that the performers and audience both "were so pleased" that the serendipitous season was...