[A series
AmericanStudying some important and impressive moments and works in the history
of American drama. I’d love to hear your responses to these posts and/or other
dramatic works, authors, and trends you’d highlight!]
On the moment,
community, and play that signaled a dramatic shift.
Despite the way us English profs
like to structure survey
classes—and I’m as guilty of this one as anybody—literary history doesn’t
tend to break up into neat or orderly time periods and movements. Other than
the very explicitly self-identifying and –defined movements, like the
Harlem Renaissance, for the most part these categories and trends comprise
instead precisely our scholarly efforts to look back at complex and overlapping
collections of writers and texts and styles and focal points and assemble them
into more easily digested (and, yes, taught) bits. Doesn’t mean that the bits
aren’t without value or can’t help us see our literary and cultural history,
just that they can be pretty reductive or limiting, especially in how we see a
particular author or text. But having said that, sometimes the moments when
literature shifts from one style or movement or another are more overt and
striking; when I had the chance to teach American Drama a few years back, I realized
that the early 20th century, and even more exactly the founding of
the Provincetown Players in the mid-1910s, represents exactly such a
transitional moment.
Up through the end of the 19th
century, American drama
had been dominated by the melodramatic—the over-the-top villains, the
doomed love stories, the comic relief characters, the big musical cues, the swordfights
on stage, etc. European drama had been evolving into something much more
socially realistic for some time, spearheaded by folks like Henrik Ibsen and George
Bernard Shaw, but as far as I can tell, that trend hadn’t reached our
shores by the turn of the century. But in the summer of 1915, a group of young
playwrights and performers vacationing in Provincetown, Massachusetts, led by a
married couple, George
Cram Cook and Susan Glaspell—all of whom having experienced rejection and
frustration in the mainstream theatrical world of the era—began sharing their
works with each other; the following year Cook and Glaspell made the impromptu
gathering into an official theatrical community, the Provincetown
Players/Playhouse. The Players quickly became best known—and are still most
significant in American literary and cultural history—for introducing the works
of Eugene O’Neill, who is in
many ways the poster child for the shift to a new social and psychological
realism in American drama. But while his first plays debuted with them in the
late 1910s, and his first hit (The Emperor Jones)
in 1920, it is a one-act play of Glaspell’s from 1916 that truly to my mind
signals the literary sea-change represented by Provincetown.
That play, Trifles, focuses on an event as melodramatic
as they get: the murder of a rural farmer, found strangled with a noose in bed
next to his sleeping wife; the wife denies any knowledge of the crime but is of
course the principal suspect in her husband’s death. That Glaspell
based this event on an actual crime that she had investigated and written
about during a stint as a journalist in Iowa makes the play’s focus real but
not necessarily realistic; she certainly could have created a melodramatic text
from this starting point. But while the play does feature the murder mystery at
its core, it does so in a profoundly realistic and powerful way: it is set
solely in the farmhouse’s kitchen, and so the three male characters who are
ostensibly investigating the crime (two local law enforcement representatives
and the neighbor who found the body) are looking elsewhere and fruitlessly for
most of the play; the two female characters, the wives of the sheriff and of
the neighbor, stay in the kitchen and, through their informal investigations
there as well as their conversations and developing understandings, unravel the
details of the crime (and a great deal else). When the male neighbor says early
in the play that “women are used to worrying over trifles,” he is thus not only
entirely wrong about whose focus and knowledge are ultimately validated, but
also ironically helping Glaspell communicate a central thesis of her new,
realistic dramatic style: that it is in the trifles, the small details of (for
example) a farmhouse’s kitchen, that life’s most central questions and
identities and relationships can unfold and be captured.
As with all the literary works on
which I’ve focused in this space, the value of Glaspell’s play extends well
beyond just scholarly conversations or even classrooms. For one thing, it’s an
engaging and often engrossing character study and murder mystery, an example of
how political art can also be appealing and popular (and in multiple
iterations, as Glaspell later turned it into a great short story, “A
Jury of Her Peers”). But it’s also a really striking reflection of a moment
when American drama was changing, when a group of American artists recognized
the significance of the far from trifling realities and lives and communities
that had often been excluded from our literature, and began to create enduring
works focused on them. Next drama tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other works, authors, or moments you’d highlight?
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