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The one-act play was central to the development of both Glaspell’s dramaturgy and twentieth-century American drama in general. The theatrical longevity and favorable critical reception of Glaspell’s first two dramatic efforts, Suppressed Desires (written with her husband George Cram Cook in 1915) and Trifles (1916), attest to her quick mastery of the one-act form of dramaturgy. She followed these two works with five additional one-acts produced in 1917–18, one of which (Tickless Time) was again a collaboration with Cook. Glaspell’s writing in the one-act form did more, however, than serve the immediate production needs of the Provincetown Players, the company that Cook, Glaspell, and a number of their friends formed in 1915. Her status as one of the key figures in the burgeoning Little Theatre movement also positioned her playwriting within an active critical discourse on the development of American drama. A part of this debate looked to the one-act as the dramatic mode par excellence for experimentation, innovation, and ultimately the foundation of a national theatrical culture. The identification of this form as a vehicle for innovative aesthetic expression provided a convenient artistic alibi for the early technical limitations of the Provincetown, which at first found one-acts as much as they could tackle. Moreover, this critical discourse lent authority to the group’s nationalist mission: to found a theater committed to the development of American playwrights and dramaturgy. In the 1917–18 subscription circular Cook reminded his audiences of the need for “one little theatre for American writers,” and by 1920–21 he felt confident to claim, “The Provincetown Players have become a national institution.”1 Between 1912 and the late 1920s numerous essays, and even entire volumes , were written on the one-act play: its history, strategies for its composition , and its relationship to extant and emerging American and European drama. Glaspell’s work, as well as that of her Provincetown colleagues, soon became an exemplar of the form. These essays’ repeated citations of Glaspell’s work as a model for the new dramaturgy reinforce the sense of her prominence and her critical standing as a leading dramatist in this period.2 Her oneact contributions to the Provincetown repertoire not only reflect her particu10 ✧✧✧✧✧✧✧ The One-Act Play in America lar thematic, social, and stylistic concerns; they also resonate with the broader issues of community and nation central to those who championed the one-act play. Thus, we can examine Glaspell’s one-acts within this critical tradition that was striving to make the drama and theater part of the development of a national literature and performance culture. The work of the Players reflects the creative synergy between them and their bohemian communities of Greenwich Village and Provincetown, Massachusetts. Similarly, there appears to be an implicit dialogue developing between these critics of the one-act form and the American artists engaged in its development. While Eugene O’Neill came to the group with his legendary trunk-full of plays already composed , most of the dramatists connected with the Players wrote specifically for the company, and the pieces had an immediacy that reflected their creators’ interest in the latest stylistic trends, local events, or political issues. Although some of the contemporary critical analysis was written by theatrical commentators such as John Corbin of the New York Times, other pieces were produced by prominent figures in the American theater who were early champions of the form, playwrights such as George Middleton (1880–1967) and Percival Wilde (1887–1953). One noteworthy feature of these articles is their remarkable homogeneity; one could hypothesize that Middleton’s essay of 1912, “The Neglected One-Act Play,” served as a blueprint for the commentary of the next fifteen years. This essay, published in the New York Dramatic Mirror, outlined the history and evolution of the form, explored issues of its production within the commercial theater, and established its connection with the Little Theatre movement in America. Middleton explains that the one-act has been looked down upon, especially by theatrical managers who assume it will not be considered serious drama and thus will not sell seats. While short comic or melodramatic plays— skits, essentially—were mainstays of the vaudeville stage, Middleton sees the dramatic one-act as a “waif” that needs the right home (13). Middleton makes a serious plea for greater consideration and creation of the form and juxtaposes it to “the morass our drama is in at present,” suggesting the one-act...

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