In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Trifles, and: The Outside, and: Suppressed Desires, and: Chains of Dew
  • Cheryl Black
Trifles. By Susan Glaspell. Directed by Helen Leblique. Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, Surrey, UK. 12 April 2008.
The Outside. By Susan Glaspell. Directed by Svetlana Dimcovic. Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, Surrey, UK. 12 April 2008.
Suppressed Desires. By Susan Glaspell and George Cram Cook. Directed by Phoebe Barran. Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, Surrey, UK. 12 April 2008.
Chains of Dew. By Susan Glaspell. Directed by Kate Saxon. Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, Surrey, UK. 12 April 2008.

Despite a surge in Glaspell scholarship during the past two decades and the formation, in 2003, of the international Susan Glaspell Society, Glaspell’s dramatic oeuvre, excepting the frequently anthologized Trifles, is rarely produced. The staging of four of her plays by a single organization in one season, therefore, is a noteworthy event. This significance is enhanced by a certain affinity between London’s Off– West End Orange Tree Theatre and the Provincetown Players, for whom the plays were originally written, and by the sensitive and skillful Orange Tree stagings. With minimal yet carefully selected scenic furnishings, atmospheric lighting and sound, and virtuoso performances, these productions effectively illustrated Glaspell’s play between naturalism and anti-naturalism and among comic, tragic, and ironic moods. Period furnishings and costumes suggestively evoked the first two decades of the twentieth century, highlighting rather than minimizing persistently relevant themes of isolation, domestic violence, gender roles, social injustice, and moral hypocrisy.

Like the legendary Provincetown Players—the experimental theatre company Glaspell co-founded with her husband George Cram Cook in 1915 as part of the anti-commercial art-theatre movement in the United States—the highly regarded Orange Tree was founded by a husband-and-wife team (artistic director Sam Walters and director/actress Auriol Smith) in 1971 as part of the UK’s alternativetheatre movement. Experimental and courageous in repertoire, the Orange Tree is noted for producing new and foreign plays (Václav Havel was an early favorite) as well as reviving forgotten works. The Orange Tree also continues the Provincetown tradition of nurturing long-lasting, communal relationships with artists and audiences and fosters democracy in spectatorship via uniform ticket prices and unreserved seating. Cozily cushioned benches in its intimate auditorium enhance the communal experience. (Greenwich Village’s Provincetown Playhouse offered similar, but famously less comfortable, bench-seating.) In keeping with Provincetown’s extraordinary support of women artists, Orange Tree devoted its entire 2007–08 season to women playwrights, and women directed all four Glaspell plays. A distinction, however, between the two physical spaces worked to this production’s advantage: the Orange Tree space is permanently configured for arena staging, an arrangement more conducive to Glaspell’s aesthetic than the Provincetown Playhouse’s more traditional proscenium configuration.

From Glaspell’s repertoire of fourteen plays (three co-authored), Orange Tree’s choices were astute: pairing her best-known and most accessible short works, Trifles and Suppressed Desires, with one of her least-known and most experimental one-acts, The Outside. Their choice to stage Chains of Dew, however, which has never been published or revived since its 1922 debut, was most historically significant. These plays represent three significant and recurring locations in Glaspell’s writing: the Midwest, Provincetown, and Greenwich Village. Chains is the only one of her full-length plays to literally represent both the Heartland and Bohemia, although cultural tensions between the two regions are present in much of her work. The plays ran in repertory in March and April, with a “Glaspell Bonanza” on 12 and 19 April offering audiences the short plays at four in the afternoon, followed by a brief dinner break, with Chains of Dew at 7:45. On 12 April, the audience also attended a morning seminar featuring lecture/discussions on Glaspell’s life and works by seven Glaspell Society scholars from five countries.

The 12 April event began with Trifles, the play Glaspell wrote in 1916 for the Players’s second summer season. Inspired by an actual murder case Glaspell had covered as a reporter for the Des Moines Daily News during 1900–1901, Trifles famously depicts [End Page 646] two Iowa farmwomen who suppress evidence that...

pdf

Share