Enemies by Neith Boyce and Hutchins Hapgood (review)

Neith Boyce and Hutchins Hapgood’s Enemies premiered at the Lewis Wharf Theatre in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 1916, during the summer that would see the official founding of the Provincetown Players. This collaboration was relished by its original audience, as the couple explored very conspicuously the gender dynamics of their marriage and the marriages of many of their friends. In the course of the play, She (played by Kersti Bryan in the Metropolitan Playhouse’s virtual production) and He (Nate Washburn) engage in a lively debate that evidences the intricacies of marriage in the age of the “New Woman” and “Free Love,” and offers new perspectives on sexual behavior, longstanding notions of love and fidelity, and the (un)changing gendered roles within couples. As proved by Metropolitan Virtual Playhouse’s production, this play is both a participant in early twentieth-century discussions of marriage and a comment on that institution in the twenty-first century. Enemies invites the audience to reconsider how much and how little marriage expectations have changed and to question the governing double standard of morality that is so difficult to overcome, now as then.

In his autobiography, A Victorian in the Modern World (1939), Hapgood explains that Boyce wrote the woman’s part and that he wrote the man’s lines in an attempt to expose gendered renegotiations of a new understanding between the sexes as they worked toward companionship and greater self-knowledge—all this in the days before the “sexual demoralization” that he finds characteristic of his and Boyce’s “community” after World War I (395). The dialogue, thus, is an autobiographical disclosure whose personal self-reflections would have been even more evident in the original production, in which Boyce played She and Hapgood played He. When Boyce and Hapgood married in 1899, in spite of Boyce’s firm disbelief in the institution itself, they pledged that she would maintain her maiden name, which she did, and pursue her writing career, which nonetheless was adversely affected by her marriage. Having four children and a husband who wanted to be idolized conflicted with the atmosphere and autonomy that Boyce needed for her writing. Boyce was not alone in this demanding struggle to be both a wife and a feminist: her friend and fellow Provincetown Player Susan Glaspell experienced similar circumstances.

It is therefore not surprising that the form of Enemies, a simple comedy, is not completely satisfying. He accuses She of spiritual infidelity and criticizes her performance as a mother and housewife; She responds that He is sexually unfaithful, tries to control her, and, in sum, has crushed her soul. The play ends with an embrace and “an armed truce”—a simplistic agreement that, despite their differences and problems, She and He still love each other. From the point of view of the play’s structure, the forced closure does not solve the conflict, and this underlines the ongoing and widespread conflict in the bohemian community, solutions to which required more challenging approaches to traditional marriage. The unsatisfying end, however, is not to be blamed on the Metropolitan Playhouse, but on the play itself.

The Metropolitan Playhouse production, which ironically took place on Valentine’s weekend, exploited the humor of the play and, what is more significant, proved to be a witty employment of the limited resources available for an online reading. Laura Livingston’s production transcended a simple reading: it managed to capture all the nuances of the play and to do it quite successfully. The production suited artistic director Alex Roe’s mission both to explore America’s theatrical heritage and to illuminate contemporary American culture. In this context, I must notice the Playhouse’s commitment to broadening the ways in which theater can be done during moments of crisis like the present one, when most of the theaters are shut down. By the time they produced Enemies, the Metropolitan Playhouse had been operating virtually for almost a year, so the...