The Rope by Alex Roe, and; Where the Cross is Made by Frank Kuhn (review)

“The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future too.”

Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey Into Night

In early spring 2020, efforts to halt the spread of COVID-19 through social distancing resulted in the suspension or cancellation of live theatrical performances throughout the United States. In a self-proclaimed attempt to “keep the theatre’s pilot lit” and more specifically to support theatre artists during this enforced furlough, New York City’s Metropolitan Playhouse launched a “Virtual Playhouse” season of free readings, live-streamed on Zoom and YouTube and simultaneously broadcast on New York’s Pacifica radio station, WBAI. At the time of this writing in late August 2020, the Virtual Playhouse had provided support for over 150 artists/technicians and reached an audience of over 8,600. The twenty-four plays presented, drawn primarily from early twentieth-century works in public domain, included five by Washington Square playwright Alice Gerstenberg; Suppressed Desires, by Susan Glaspell and George Cram Cook; The People, by Glaspell; Constancy, by Provincetown playwright Neith Boyce; Compromise, by Black Renaissance playwright Willis Richardson; and two O’Neill one-acts, The Rope and Where the Cross Is Made. The bounty will continue: near my deadline, the theatre announced a fall season that would include Glaspell’s Woman’s Honor, Alfred Kreymborg’s Vote the New Moon, and Alice Rostetter’s The Widow’s Veil (all originally produced by the Provincetown Players). Although the entire Virtual Season would be of interest to this journal’s readers, this essay focuses primarily on performances of the two works by O’Neill.

Nearly a century separates the writing of these plays with their Metropolitan presentations in a manner undreamed of even by the forward-thinking theatrical experimenters at the Provincetown Playhouse. Their re-viewing under these circumstances and in this context sheds new light on their meaning(s) and their enduring significance, as well as occasioning a few thoughts on the possibilities and limitations of virtual theatrical performance. These performances highlight links between our current cultural moment and that of a century ago, beginning with affinities between the Provincetown Players and the Metropolitan Playhouse, its East Village location a ten- minute cab ride from O’Neill’s theatrical home at the Provincetown Playhouse on MacDougal Street. The stated mission of the Metropolitan Playhouse—to explore “America’s theatrical heritage” in order to “illuminate contemporary American culture”—resonates with the Provincetown Players’ commitment to developing a home-grown American drama that would effect artistic and social transformation. Recurring reminders to viewers to love and care for their neighbors from Metropolitan’s artistic director, Alex Roe, evoke Provincetown spiritus rector Jig Cook’s zeal to foster a “beloved community of lifegivers.” (Roe provided information for this review and generously made the Virtual Playhouse archive available to me.)

The Virtual Playhouse season and the Provincetown Players’ 1918‒19 season, when The Rope and Where the Cross Is Made debuted, share the extraordinary social context of pandemic: from 1918‒19, the so-called Spanish flu caused over 600,000 deaths in the United States, with an estimated global death toll of 20‒50 million. Then, as now, social distancing, mask-wearing, and similar precautions were employed to prevent infection. Although theatres across the United States closed, Broadway carried on with minor adjustments, for example the staggering of curtain times, the elimination of SRO, and the banning of smoking, coughing, and sneezing in auditoriums. The Washington Square Players and the Greenwich Village Theatre closed—presumably due to the pandemic, which peaked in October 1918—but the Provincetown Players performed twenty-five one-acts and one full-length play during the 1918‒19 season. The lack of attention granted the 1918 pandemic by theatre historians and playwrights is mystifying, although the Players’ first chronicler...