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After the 1933 failure of The Comic Artist on Broadway, Glaspell never again had a new play produced, but she did not sever her ties with the theater community , and those within it appear not to have forgotten her. She received an offer of employment from Hallie Flanagan, director of the Federal Theater Project (FTP) in Washington, DC, which had been established in 1935 as a division of the Works Progress Administration. Flanagan wanted her to move to Chicago to become the head of the project’s Midwest Play Bureau. From the fall of 1936 through May 1938 Glaspell devoted herself to the Federal Theater and its goal of finding new plays to produce and theatrical artists to employ. She became an outspoken champion of her area’s playwrights, actors, and directors. During her tenure the Midwestern Bureau produced such landmarks of FTP history as “the all-black Swing Mikado, Spirochete (Arnold Sundgaard’s Living Newspaper on syphilis), and black playwright Theodore Ward’s Big White Fog” (Noe, Critical Biography 196).1 At the end of that period, however, Glaspell seems to have decided to renew her focus on her first creative medium, fiction, writing three last novels and a children’s story.2 From this point until her death, in 1948, she lived almost exclusively in her home on Cape Cod. The eruption of World War II and the entrance of the United States into the conflict prompted Glaspell to turn to drama again, however, for what was to be her last play, Springs Eternal. Subtitled “A Comedy in Three Acts,” the work adheres to both the classical sense of the term comedy, with a conclusion in proposed marriage, and to the more common notions of a humorous piece, although this second aspect of its dramaturgy is open to critique. Despite the occasional light moments and flashes of wit reminiscent of Glaspell’s wryest work, especially in the first act, the play overall evinces a rather ironic feel, with philosophical dialogue and a more serious tone dominant by the play’s conclusion . This movement from comedy to drama worked effectively in such earlier pieces as The Verge and Chains of Dew. Here, however, Glaspell was not so successful. The overwhelming force of the conflict abroad, which reverberates throughout the play’s narrative, creates both structural and tonal problems for Springs Eternal that Glaspell was not able to resolve. 243 Springs Eternal ✧✧✧✧✧✧✧ The play is set entirely in the “living room, which is also [the] library, in the Higgenbothem home in New York State. . . . A hospitable, open . . . room, giving the sense of a cultivated, though rather casual family, having lived there for some time” (1.1). In fact, Owen and his second wife’s, Margaret Higgenbothem ’s, home serves as the meeting point for an entire extended clan, who either descend on the scene or check in by telephone throughout the action. Act 1 is set on the day of an emergency “family conference” (1.2–3). The meeting has been prompted by the presumed elopement of Dottie, the daughter of family friends, with Stewie Gleason, a Washington politician married to Owen’s ex-wife, who is called “Harry” (short for Harriet). Dottie’s father Thayer and stepmother Evelyn do not appear onstage but are nevertheless quite present through their numerous phone calls during the play.3 With what Marcia Noe wryly remarks is“surely the understatement of the play”Margaret Higgenbothem acknowledges,“We have entangling alliances”in the family (Critical Biography 224). Continuing her military conceit, she explains that they have a history of “breaking our pacts,” particularly regarding marriage (1.3). These lines soon resonate with other themes in the play, including her husband Owen’s seeming inability to sustain his former political convictions and visionary fervor. Owen is a linguistics scholar and philosophical writer whose book, World of Tomorrow, written after World War I, reflected his then-radical sympathies. Through the character of Owen and his writing Glaspell repeats some themes and narrative details she develops in her 1942 novel, Norma Ashe. Noe reads this novel as reflecting what“Glaspell believed to have brought about”the war. In Noe’s words,“Norma Ashe details the failure of idealism, the slow, steady process by which youthful ideals are destroyed, perverted , buried by the tedium of daily life” (Critical Biography 214).4 The novel’s focus on the influence of a philosophy teacher on his students corresponds to the influence of Owen’s book on the younger generation in...

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