The Birth of Modern American Theater

by James Lundy

At a pitch session, Connor Davis said “let’s do something on the Provincetown Players”, and a bell rang in my head. I remembered vague references to the famed troupe in high school theater class, so his idea intrigued. I volunteered to assemble a script.

 

I began to research the fascinating early twentieth-century history of Greenwich Village. The young and celebrated novelist Floyd Dell wrote:

 

“The past is past. The nineteenth century seems such a queer time to us now. We can’t read its books or admire its great men, for now they seem foolish. They saw a solution to every problem. They saw law and order everywhere—in the movements of the stars and in the colors of a butterfly’s wing. They had discovered the laws of progress…there were to be no more wars. Machinery was to do away with human labor. Everyone was to be happy and virtuous…”

 

Progressive artists of the time suspected the falseness of the past, and the unfolding tragic history of the twentieth century proved them correct—eerily similar to more recent refutations of the 1990s assertion that “history is dead”.

 

History never ends, though it repeats, but there has never been another bed as hot as Greenwich Village in the century’s second decade. In 1912 a secret club of women met, and met every Saturday for twenty-five years to discuss ideas bursting from the intimacy they built among themselves—women’s rights, sexual autonomy and birth control, the vote, socialism, labor organizing, anti-lynching and racial justice. Mabel Dodge and others hosted events where these ideas percolated. Novelists Neith Boyce, Floyd Dell and Susan Glaspell and others fictionalized them, while academic George Cram “Jig” Cook compared the rising artistic profile of the United States to ancient Greece, portending a New American Century.

 

Summers sweltered, persuading some in the Village to seek cooler seaside temperatures in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Becoming bored far from the whirl of New York, they had plentiful flings but it wasn’t enough. Neither Neith Boyce nor Susan Glaspell had tried theater before, though both were award-winning novelists.

 

So with a great “why not?”, on July 15, 1915 they presented two rookie scripts in Neith’s Provincetown living room—her own “Constancy”, and “Suppressed Desires” by Susan and her husband, Jig Cook. The next year they were brave enough to attempt the dramatically far more complex “Trifles” by Susan Glaspell.

 

Their works were among the first in a pioneering form—the one-act play—that did not originate in Provincetown but was appearing in beloved “little theaters” seemingly everywhere. These new works promoted spare sets, immediacy of action, and social and political relevance. Instead of admiring and celebrating the existing order, they attacked it. The authors rejected the lavish sets, exaggerated acting and air of overstuffed complacency of Broadway, and the “psychological shallowness that decoration obscured.”

 

The Provincetown Players played two summers in their namesake village, then left forever, finally becoming the “Playwrights’ Theater”—on Broadway. Before working on this project, every telling of the Provincetown story I remember ends with the emergence of Eugene O’Neill, but that was a consequence.

 

This performance is about beginnings. We retell, as much as possible in the original words of Neith Boyce, Susan Glaspell, George Cram “Jig” Cook, Floyd Dell, and others, what took place those first few nights of the Provincetown Players. We hint at the pivotal change they brought to American theater, now known as Modern American Theater.

 

It’s unclear whether they knew exactly what they were doing. But they sensed which direction to take, not merely to burn down what was, but to build something meaningful and revolutionary in their wake.

 

We hope you enjoy “Playing Provincetown”.