Provincetown Players

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The Provincetown Players was an amateur theater company that began in the East End of Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1915 in the private homes of George Cram Cook and Susan Glaspell and Hutchins Hapgood and Neith Boyce but soon opened a new theatre on a wharf there. The early years of the players are most famous for their productions of plays by American playwrights Eugene O'Neill and Susan Glaspell. They were also associated with the works of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Wilbur Daniel Steele, Neith Boyce, Floyd Dell, Djuna Barnes, Evelyn Scott, Theodore Dreiser, and others.

Eugene O'Neill

The Provincetown players were 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. 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.^[1]

The Provincetown Players are often associated with the "Little Theatre Movement, " a crowd of anarchists, socialists, feminists, advocates of free love and of birth control who made up the "Little Theatre Movement". Their sexual and aesthetic revolution was a new era in America's social and artistic life, predicting in some ways the cultural changes that were more widely available in America after the 1960s.

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."^[2] 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 became the Provincetown Players, "an organic thing like a plant growing."^[3] This ecstatic, collective creation in Provincetown was the prologue to The Playwright's Theatre of New York. During that interim period, Mary Heaton Vorse purchased a dilapidated, old fish shack at Lewis Wharf on Provincetown Harbor at a low price due to damage from the Portland Gale. Vorse was part of a group of writers, intellectuals, and activists including Susan Glaspell, George Cram Cook, John Reed, Louise Bryant, and others who "discovered" Eugene O'Neill. O'Neill's first production on any stage, Bound East for Cardiff, debuted in Vorse's fish shack on the night of July 28. Susan Glaspell would later describe the event this way:

"The sea has been good to Eugene O'Neill. It was there for his opening. There was a fog, just as the script demanded, fog bell in the harbor. The tide was in, and it washed under us and around, spraying through the holes in the floor, giving us the rhythm and the flavor of the sea while the big dying sailor talked to his friend Doris of the life he had always wanted deep in the land, where you'd never see a ship or smell the sea."

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 and is buried in Delphi.^[4]

1 Conclusion
2 References
3 Notes
4 External Links and More Reading

[edit] Conclusion

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. Bette Davis made her stage debut there. That company continues as the Provincetown Playhouse.

Provincetown Playhouse, 133 MacDougal St., Manhattan

In 2006, The Provincetown Theater Company and the Provincetown Repertory Theater announced a merger to form the New Provincetown Players.

[edit] References

[edit] Notes

^ Black, Cheryl (2002). Women of Provincetown, 1915-1922. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
^ Hartley, Marsden; Ed. A. Kreymborg, et al. (1936). The New Caravan: Farewell Charles, 556-7.
^ Vorse, Mary Heaton (1935). Footnote To Folly, 129.
^ Sarlós, Robert K.. Jig Cook and the Provincetown Players: Theatre in Ferment. 1982: University of Massachusetts Press.