Women Writers of the Provincetown Players: A Collection of Short Works (review)

Among the many not-for-profit theaters that were founded in the United States in the early twentieth century, the Provincetown Players was the most important. The Little Theatre or Art Theatre movement was a self-conscious alternative to the commercial theater epitomized by Broadway. The group was unique in that it was founded by an extraordinary collection of writers, artists, and intellectuals who lived in New York's Greenwich Village and vacationed in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where the group was founded. Among them were Susan Glaspell and Eugene O'Neill, the two playwrights of the period now most respected by critics and scholars; several writers who did their most important work in other genres, such as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Djuna Barnes, and Neith Boyce; and people who achieved their reputations in the world through activism as well as writing, such as Mary Heaton Vorse, John Reed, and Louise Bryant.

As Cheryl Black has pointed out in The Women of Provincetown, 1915-1922, the group was also perhaps unique for the time because it involved a large number of women, not only as actors, writers, designers, and costumers but also as directors and officers. Black has counted more than 120 women who were associated with the Provincetown group during its short life, most of whom were also involved in the feminist movement flourishing in Greenwich Village during the Progressive Era. Judith E. Barlow notes in her introduction, "Women may well have been attracted to the Provincetown Players by what today might be called its feminist structure: emphasis on community, commitment to decision making by consensus, absence of a rigid power hierarchy, and disdain for commercial success" (20). Although this commitment was honored more in theory than in practice, there is no doubt that Provincetown provided an unusually hospitable site for women to exercise their talent.

Five of the thirteen one-act plays in this volume have previously been anthologized; the remainder either have not been reprinted since the 1920s or are printed here for the first time. Barlow's editorial work is impeccable. She has located and compared multiple manuscript versions of the plays and written informative introductions to each. Many of these introductions contain important original scholarship that offers much needed insight into authors such as Mary Carolyn Davies, Rita Wellman, and Bosworth Crocker, whose work Barlow recovers and who clearly deserve further scholarly attention.

Barlow has included one play by each woman whose work was produced by the Provincetown Players, selecting each for its quality and for its ability to "showcase the range and depth of female writers' contributions to the group" (6). These represent a broad aesthetic spectrum: Millay's use of the Harlequinade and Virgil's Eclogues; the allegorical fantasies of Louise Bryant and Mary Carolyn Davies; the feminist realism of Alice Rostetter, Bosworth Crocker, and Edna Ferber; and the comedy of Djuna Barnes, Rita Wellman, and Susan Glaspell. Another characteristic notable in the plays is humor. Barlow suggests that the public support of feminism offered by such well-known members of the Players as Hutchins Hapgood and Floyd Dell masked a thinly veiled hostility to women who actually tried to live by feminist principles. She notes that Glaspell and Barnes "use comic modes to critique the dangerous ideal men craft for women to live up to," suggesting that "women writers sensed the covert strain of antifeminism among male colleagues at the Provincetown Players and therefore found it difficult to present a serious, positive portrayal of the 'new woman.' Humor was safer" (17).

In her introduction, Barlow notes that the plays share several characteristics that show their feminist origins. Featuring protagonists who are predominantly female, they place women at the center of the action. Thematically, "many of these works either celebrate female friendship or point out the necessity of women's banding together in the face of a hostile world," and "most of these plays "challenge...