Provincetown Players

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Provincetown Players was an amateur theater company that began in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on the tip of Cape Cod, in 1915, and is most famous for producing the plays of American playwrights, Eugene O'Neill and Susan Glaspell. It was also associated with the work of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Wilbur Daniel Steele, Neith Boyce, Floyd Dell, Djuna Barnes, Evelyn Scott, Theodore Dreiser, and others.

The Provincetown Players -- a crowd of anarchists, socialists, feminists, advocates of free love and of birth control -- were that part of the "Little Theatre Movement" intent on supporting the production of new American plays in a collective creative process, and moving away from conventional melodrama as played in the commercial theatres on Broadway. They wanted to give young playwrights and other theatre artists the opportunity to experiment without regard for financial concerns on a small stage, before an audience that considered itself as part of the creative process. At first they staged primarily one-act-plays, but soon they produced full-length plays as well. Their sexual and aesthetic revolutionary acts helped usher in a new era in America's social and artistic life. A remarkable feature of the group was the (at the time) unusually large quantity and quality of participation of women, both in artistic and management functions.

Why would a theatre group, the bulk of whose work was created in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, insist on calling itself PROVINCETOWN Players? The answer lies in what the painter, Marsden Hartley, called "that remarkable and never repeated summer in Provincetown," one he believed "was really huge in import, and huge in various satisfaction." [Hartley, "Farewell, Charles," THE NEW CARAVAN, (N.Y., 1936), pp.556-7.] In that inspired, ecstatic summer of 1915 an amorphous and nameless creative collective came into being, which -- reconvening after a winter's pause -- by the end of the summer of 1916 (after the "discovery" of O'Neill, whose Bound East for Cardiff they put on in a boathouse, his first production on any stage) became the Provincetown Players, "an organic thing like a plant growing."[Mary Heaton Vorse, FOOTNOTE TO FOLLY, (N.Y.1935),p.129]This ecstatic, collective creation in Provincetown was the prologue to the Playwright's Theatre in New York's Macdougal Street.

Many of Susan Glaspell's plays were produced by this company beginning with the one-actsTrifles, The People, Close the Book, and Woman's Honor, continuing with the full-length Bernice and The Verge. The company itself was in fact founded by Ms. Glaspell and her husband, George "Jig" Cram Cook, whose plays , as well as some they had jointly written, were also performed by the group. After the phenomenal success of O'Neill's The Emperor Jones in 1920, the original amateur spirit and the collective process was breaking down and caused a series of crises in the company, and as the Provincetown Players announced an "interim" year, Glaspell and Cook left for Greece in 1922. Jig Cook died there two years later; he is buried in Delphi.

In 1923 a successor organization came into being under the management of O'Neill, scene designer Robert Edmond Jones, and critic Kenneth Macgowan. Called the Experimental Theatre, Inc., it broke with the amateur and collective operation; and also operated the Greenwich Village Theatre. That company disbanded in 1929.

[edit] References

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../p/r/o/Provincetown_Players_bd9f.html"