Women Writers of the Provincetown Players (review)

{ 135 } BOOK REV IEwS \ Women Writers of the Provincetown Players. By Judith Barlow. Albany: State University of New York, 2009. 320 pp. $29.95 paper. Women Writers of the Provincetown Players serves as a welcome addition to the growing body of work on American women dramatists and the Provincetown Players, the influential theatre that began in the summer of 1915 as“an informal group of friends on Cape Cod” (2). While many “little theatres” of this period were producing plays by established European and British playwrights of the era, such as Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, and Shaw, the Provincetown Players were “dedicated to supporting work by American dramatists and involving them in the production” (2). Of their seven-year production period, the majority of works produced were one-act plays by approximately fifty dramatists, sixteen of whom were women. Barlow narrows her focus in this work to twelve women dramatists and thirteen works. While Barlow acknowledges important earlier works such as Cheryl Black’s The Women of Provincetown, 1915–1922 and Barbara Ozieblo’s The Province­ town Players: A Choice of Shorter Works, she expands significantly on previous scholarship by providing insightful and engrossing background material of the twelve women in her volume. Not only does she describe these writers individually and the reception of these representative works, she also discusses the degree of each writer’s involvement with the Players. Susan Glaspell, a cofounder of the Players and “the most important woman dramatist of the group” (6), saw eleven of her plays produced by the Players. Neith Boyce, Rita Wellman, Djuna Barnes, and Edna St. Vincent Millay each saw three to four of their works produced . The remaining women whose works are represented in Barlow’s volume— Louise Bryant, Mary Carolyn Davies, Rita Creighton Smith, Alice L. Rostetter, Bosworth Crocker (Mary Arnold Crocker Childs Lewisohn), Mary Foster Barber , and Edna Ferber—each contributed one work to the Players’ repertory. As Barlow states in her introduction, the plays in this anthology were included for their individual quality and are examples “from each of the women who had a short play presented by the Provincetown Players” (6). Indeed,“they showcase the range and depth of female writers’ contribution to the group” (6). Louise Bryant’s symbolic morality play, The Game, and Davies’s parable, The Slave with Two Faces, represent thought-provoking abstract pieces, while Boyce’s Winter’s Night serves as a “realistic tragedy about rural marriage” (8). Glaspell’s Woman’s Honor relies heavily on farce and situation yet projects a feminist theme, while Smith’s compelling piece, The Rescue, addresses issues { 136 } BOOK REV IEwS of independence and family influence. Both Rostetter in The Widow’s Veil and Crocker in The Baby Carriage create urban settings with touching stories of women who are neighbors. Irish characters populate both Barber’s The Squealer, a play about a husband who has been arrested for involvement with the Molly Maguires, a secret organization of Irish American coal miners, and Barnes’s comic work, Kurzy of the Sea. Ferber provides a bitter commentary on the relationship between the sexes in The Eldest, a tale of Rose, a woman who slaves for selfish family members while still carrying a torch for the man who left her fifteen years earlier; when the suitor returns, wealthy and successful, it is Rose’s younger sister he courts. War provides the theme for three of the plays in this collection. The oftanthologized Aria da Capo by Edna St.Vincent Millay, states Barlow,“is as relevant today as it was when Millay wrote it nearly a century ago; the play shows how the world degenerates while a self-absorbed couple debate clothing, art, and artichokes” (11). Two other plays that occur during wartime are The Rib­ Person and The Horrors of War, previously unpublished plays by Rita Wellman. The Rib­Person depicts three distinctly different women, two of whom choose to help in the war effort as correspondent and nurse. Wellman’s The Barbarians was her first one-act staged by the Players on a “war bill.” Although the Players ’ script of this comedy is apparently lost, Barlow located an earlier version titled The Horrors of War and includes...