5.5. American Theater: Modernist theater

Provincetown Players:

  • group of young innovative people

  • Bigsby describes them as “birth of 20th century American drama”

  • 1915 “wharf theater” in Prvincetown, Mass., Cape Cod

  • 1916 ff. in NYC

  • 30 members

    • Playwrights e.g. Susan Glaspell, Djuna Barnes

    • Producers e.g. George Cram Cook, Nina Moise

    • Stage designer e.g. Robert Edmund Jones

  • Example plays:

    • Susan Glaspell: “Trifles”, “Alison's house”, …

    • Eugene O'Neill “Bound East for Cardiff”

    • George Cram Cook “Change your Style”

Agenda of Provincetown Players

Against:

  • commercialized broadway

  • theater and star system

  • sentimental melodrame

  • sensationalist drama

  • exaggerated realistic stage settings

For:

  • artistic drama

  • innovative/experimental forms

  • psychological dispositions

  • sincere acting

  • simple but symbolic stage settings

Call for one-act play

  • complete unity of thought

  • everything condensed in one

  • symbolic but not representative, major impact on future playwrights

  • e.g. Susan Glaspell “Trifles”

    • psychology of men and women

    • feminist features, female bonding

    • analytic structure

    • extreme characters

    • symbolisms (cage, bird)

More modern/ist theater (political play from Harlem Renaissance

→ Also from African American authors

  • historical pageants e.g. Langston Hughes “Don't you want to be fffree” 1937

  • melodrama e.g. Angelina Weld Grimké “Rachel” 1916

  • political one-act plays/folk sketches e.g. Mary Burrill “They that sit in Darkness” 1919