Jig Cook and the Provincetown Players: Theatre in Ferment by Robert Károly Sarlós (review)

Book Reviews 451 However one chooses to answer this question, Plays ofImpasse has helped to set the agenda for a significant debate. The book is timely, well organized, and clear. It should be of interest to all students of contemporary drama. MICHAEL HINDEN, THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ROBERT KAROLY SARL6s. Jig Cook and the Provincetown Players: Theatre in Ferment. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press 1982. Pp. xii, 265, illustrated. $25. Fifty-one years separate the publishing ofThe Provincetown: A Story ofthe Theatre and Jig Cook and the Provincetown Players, the only two books to date devoted to chronicling the story of America's epochal theatre group. The first was written by Helen Deutsch and Stella Hanau, two people associated with the theatre in its later form under the MacGowan/Jones/O'Neill triumvirate: Deutsch listed as business manager, and Hanau as press representative of the 1925 group. From their positions as participants of the offshoot - which the writers admit "never quite succeeded" (p. 58) - Deutsch and Hanau were able to draw from personal observations and remembrances of the original theatre. Robert Karoly Sarlos's study, originally written as a doctoral dissertation in the late sixties, also records the memories of surviving Provincetown participants such as Edna Kenton, Jasper Deeters, Floyd Dell, James Light, and Nilla Cook, all of whom have since died. And while it does not have the immediate personal associations that made the earlier study a lively albeit SUbjective account, the s~udy compensates by drawing from the welter of material on the Provincetown Players held in several libraries. One is particularly grateful to Sarlos for summarizing documents that, because ofthe deplorable condition in which they are kept at the Lincoln Center Library in New York, are in danger of disappearing as sources for future scholarship. The result of Sarlos's efforts is a book that supplements Deutsch and Hanau's study, filling in needed details and facts, describing internecine fights and technical problems surrounding production, and indicating the Provincetown Players' continual struggles for financing. So competently does Sarlos handle these details and provide a coherent narrative of the Provincetown experiment, that the book would be an unqualified success ifchronicle were its avowed purpose. However, in his introduction Sarlos writes: "This book is an attempt to relate the contribution of Jig Cook and the Provincetown Players primarily to American theatre and culture; secondarily to wider artistic and intellectual crosscurrents " (p. 6). His very choice oftitle, including as it does the name ofJig Cook, indicates his broader goal. When measured by his stated purpose, Sarlos's study falters. Before "relating" the contribution of a man, one must know who he is, what he believed, what he wanted to contribute, and what he actually left behind. Sarlos never describes Cook, not even his simple biography, nor offers a coherent picture of Cook's theories and goals in his work with the Provincetown Players. Without such a discussion, it is fruitless to talk about "legacies" to American theatre. In Chapter Three, the weakest and most disorganized section ofhis book, Sarlos drops the continuity ofthe Provincetown story he has been telling; leaves the fledgling group on the beaches of 452 Book Reviews Provincetown in 1916 about to take their theatre to Greenwich Village; and turns his attention to Cook in a section entitled "Jig Cook: Dionysos in 1915." The subject is an exciting one. Anyone who has read Susan Glaspell's moving and revelatory biography of her husband, The Road to the Temple, has some idea of the complexities of this talented, contradictory, galvanizing personality. There are also the vivid accounts of Cook's years in Davenport, Iowa told by his young protege from that period, Floyd Dell, in Dell's autobiography, The Homecoming, and in his novel Moon-Calf, where Cook is called Tom Alden. Then there are Cook's two novels, Roderick Taliaferro (1903) and The Chasm (1911); his two major plays The Athenian Women (1918) and The Spring (1921); and his diaries, letters, and papers held at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, a library Sarlos used. Instead of availing himself of any of these sources in drawing a picture of Cook's theories of...