Playing Life and Death in Provincetown: Two New Versions of Louise Bryant's The Game, 1915 and 1916

The performances that occurred in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on the evening of July 28, 1916, continue to be of special significance and have perhaps drawn the widest scholarly interest in the Provincetown Players. On the stage of the Wharf Theatre, the group presented Eugene O'Neill's debut, Bound East for Cardiff. On the same bill that evening was journalist Louise Bryant's "morality play," The Game, as well as a spoof of bohemians in Provincetown by noted short-story writer Wilbur Daniel Steele, which was called Not Smart (a local Cape Cod euphemism for pregnant). While the Provincetown Players were aware of the importance of the O'Neill debut—a reading of his play had astounded them some weeks earlier according to playwright Susan Glaspell¹— it was the staging of The Game that gave the Provincetown Players their image as a modernist theater company. The Game became one of the first original American plays to use setting and direction based on postimpressionist art when the Paris-trained American artists William and Marguerite Zorach adapted Bryant's script.² A linoleum-block engraving of Marguerite's stage design, featuring a Cubist-inspired moon suspended over a seascape, was for years used by the Players on programs. It appears on a poster behind Bryant's first husband, journalist and revolutionary John Reed, in a famous photograph.

Several new finds related to Bryant's The Game now reveal much about the play's composition, Bryant's original intentions for the mise en scène, and critical information about the Zorachs' staging. The most significant of these documents is a remarkable draft of the 1916 text of the play that includes over thirty hitherto-unknown line drawings indicating the positions taken during the performance by the character of Death, played originally by John Reed. The Zorachs' staging of the play has long been known to have included stylized gestures for the actors, who were required to move "in a flat plane in pantomime."³ Surviving photographs show examples of several individual poses, but there has been available until now neither a record of the pattern of movements for any of the characters in the play nor a means to understand how the Zorachs' movements were tied to Bryant's dialogue. This 1916 text, which I located in the Louise Bryant Papers at Yale University and which we print here for the first time, opens the possibility of a production of the play with something close to its original gestural movements and also reveals a great deal about the way the Zorachs adapted Bryant's play.⁴

Other fascinating Bryant documents have also recently become available. In republishing the long-out-of-print 1916 version of The Game, Judith Barlow added in her introduction important commentary about an earlier version of the script Bryant had submitted for copyright in 1915.⁵ I have located an additional complete text and another fragment of this 1915 text, also in the Bryant papers at Yale University. These earlier 1915 drafts of the play are different from the published 1916 text known to scholars of the Provincetown Players, containing, for example, more references to contemporary events. We therefore publish here, alongside the 1916 text with the hieroglyphic-like illustrations, an edition of the 1915 version of The Game based on the three extant drafts. The 1915 text not only tells us some interesting new facts about the play—for example, that it was not written for the Provincetown Players, whom Bryant did not meet until 1916—but also suggests ways the Zorachs developed their staging based on Bryant's original stage directions. Further, few scripts from the Provincetown Player's first two summers survive as original drafts, thus making the existence of an early version of The Game of particular importance.

The Game, 1916

Appreciation of The Game, both by the Players themselves and by subsequent critics, has largely rested on the play's innovative staging, which was the result of collaboration between Bryant and visual artists William and Marguerite Zorach in Provincetown in...