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SUSAN GLASPELL AND THE PROVINCETOWN WHEN SUSAN GLASPELL MARRIED George Cram Cook in 1913 and moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, for a summer honeymoon, she was making the most important move in her life. Not only was she entering marriage, but she was moving from the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth, from the culture of the Midwest to that of the East, and moving artistically from being a conventional novelist to becoming an experimental playwright. Born and educated in Iowa, she had written two novels and numerous short stories in the local color tradition, which were designed for the Midwestern fern.. inine audience and patterned to suit that public's taste for escapist fiction. "Jig" Cook, however, had no such provincial tendencies. He had been rejecting his conservative Davenport background most of his life, writing unsuccessful Socialist novels, editing the 'Friday Review with Floyd Dell in Chicago, and following Bohemia from the "little renaissance" in Chicago to New York's Greenwich Village. Married to Cook and living in the Village, Miss Glaspell could not avoid being influenced by his restless revolt against convention and his strong sympathy with whatever was new in art and life. Cook was excited by the possibilities of a new American drama. He had been thrilled by the visit of the Irish Players in Chicago in 1911, had seen productions of the Chicago Little Theatre, and was to play a minor role in the opening of the Washington Square Players. Broadway revealed no such possibilities: We went to the theater, and for the most part we came away wishing we had gone somewhere else. . . . Plays, like magazine stories, were patterned. They might be pretty good within themselves , seldom did they open out to-where it surprised or thrilled your spirit to follow.... An audience, Jig said, had imagination. What was this "Broadway," which could make a thing as interesting as life into a thing as dull as a Broadway play?l The next step was obvious: one evening they wrote a play satirizing a current Village fad, psychoanalysis, called it "Suppressed 1 Susan Glaspell, The Road to the Temple (New York, 1927). p. 248. 174 1964 GLASPELL AND THE PROVINCETOWN 175 Desires," and invited some friends over for an evening of fireside theatricals. That summer (1915) in Provincetown when they did their play again, along with two others written by neighbors, they had the nucleus for an amateur theater. From the Wharf Theater in Provincetown, to a renovated stable in the Village, then to a theater of their own, the story of The Playwright's Theater, or Provincetown Players, is familiar and told best by Susan Glaspell in The Road to the Temple. The Cooks' lives from 1914 to 1922 were inextricably bound to the Provincetown Players. In that tiny theater on Macdougal Street Cook's peculiar sensitivity and supreme idealism could triumph; without him the Players would not have survived for long. As the wife of the Director, Susan Glaspell was expected to participate in the activities of the playhouse: she was one of the finest actresses in the group, a part-time publicity agent, stage hand, occasional director, prop woman, etc. But she was also a writer. Far more important than any other contribution she made were the seven one-acts and four full-length plays she wrote exclusively for the Provincetown.2 Along with Eugene O'Neill she was a leading Provincetown playwright . What has been overlooked about her plays is the fact that they serve as the best illustration of the Provincetown ideal, the best measure of its success as a leading force in the beginnings of modern American drama, and, incidentally, as the best means of evaluating her artistic abilities. Before and after the Provincetown years, with the exception of two plays,3 she was a Midwestern novelist, limited to an idealistic defense of the agrarian tradition and restricted to the conventional, romantic novel, changing little in ideas or techniques from first to last. As a playwright, however, she matched her talent with the experimental temper of her new world and for a few years she was the best evidence of the Provincetown belief that, given a chance and a theater of...

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