One of the central questions asked about the Provincetown Players, a seminal American theater company, is “What went wrong?”¹ What  caused the dissolution of the original group in the spring of 1922, at the end of its sixth season in New York, at exactly the point at which it had achieved its greatest triumphs? Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape was headed to Broadway, following on the overwhelming success of his The Emperor Jones; Susan Glaspell’s The Verge was a cause célèbre on MacDougal Street; and O’Neill and Glaspell were being heralded as creators of an indigenous American drama. Critics, previously dismissive of the little theater on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, with its notoriously hard benches and cramped stage, were vying for places and writing reviews, which included phrases such as “the most important theatre in America.” Many studies of the period have cited a number of reasons for the demise of the Players. Some claim it was the fault of Director George Cram (Jig) Cook, because of his dominant personality, chaotic management style, intense jealousy of Eugene O’Neill’s achievements, and abiding bitterness over his own failure as a playwright. Others argue that it was the drift toward Broadway, which strained the resources and talents of the company, and caused rifts among those competing for recognition. Still others assume that the theater simply reached the inevitable end facing an experimental group that has served its purpose.

These assessments and others are found in the three histories of the
theater company: Edna Kenton’s manuscript, “The Provincetown Players and the Playwrights’ Theatre, 1915-1922,”² Helen Deutsch and Stella Hanau’s 1931 study, The Provincetown: A Story of the Theatre and Robert Károly Sarlós’s 1982 Jig Cook and the Provincetown Players. Although each fixes on slightly different answers—depending on the authors’ relationship to the participants and particular aims in the book—all three focus attention on the events of those tumultuous final years of the Provincetown Players, 1920­1922.

For Kenton, script reader, board member, and self-appointed conscience of the company, the undoing of the original Provincetown Players was a direct result of its success. In the wake of The Emperor Jones “values had shifted overnight, astonishingly,” she claims (141). The group changed direction; eyes were now fixed above 14th Street. It was no longer enough to have a hit at home; real success meant Broadway. It was Kenton who cast the lone vote against the transfer of Jones uptown, fearing that the limited resources of the theater would be strained were they forced to support two companies. This is exactly what occurred. While coffers and subscriptions first swelled from $3,000 and 1,500 members in the wake of the Broadway success, money went out even faster, spent on simultaneous productions, additional staff, and more elaborate productions, befitting the theater’s new status. Personal jealousies within the company also surfaced. Those performing uptown received salaries commensurate with Broadway standards; those remaining on MacDougal Street nursed the bruised egos that came with small paychecks. In addition, after years of paying their own way, critics were finally given free tickets, a sign to Kenton that the Players had turned away from its primary tenets: give no heed nor house tickets to the Press. As Kenton describes the situation, “We were a little drunk with the wine of applause and we lost our balance and fell” (141). The company held out for one more season, until “The Hairy Ape had wrecked us with its questions of directorship and problems of production” (155). However, she argues, O’Neill’s refusal to allow Cook to direct the play “was only the immediate cause”; the end of the Players was determined once it started to read and respond to critics. In her version of the history, there is no recrimination over the leadership or personality of Cook, whom she steadfastly supported, and for whom she acted as proxy, when he and Glaspell left for Greece before the conclusion of the 1921-22 season.

Ironically, one error in her book, gone unchecked and repeated by later writers, including O’Neill’s biographer Louis Sheaffer, has led others to castigate Cook for the Players’ demise. It relates to his play The Spring, a paean to psychic phenomena and Native American mysticism, which had opened on MacDougal Street to surprisingly good reviews considering its lugubrious form and often ludicrous events and dialogue. When Cook decided to follow O’Neill’s example and seek a Broadway run for his play, financing the project himself, Kenton reports that the move was a disaster: “On the third night four tickets were sold at the box office. On the fourth night it ended its run and Jig and Susan went up to Provincetown to recover before coming back to put on Susan’s The Verge” (144). She implies that Cook was crushed by the humiliating rejection of his play. This is incorrect on two counts. While certainly not a success, The Spring was performed for at least two weeks. Burns Mantle’s yearly account indicates twenty-one performances, a longer run during the season than plays by Ibsen and Shaw. Also, Cook seemed unfazed by the experience. In a letter to Glaspell two weeks after the opening on Broadway, he reports that the first week’s take was $500, and the second had jumped to $1,500, a steady growth, but far less than the $2,400 needed to keep the play running. These figures are scribbled on a side margin, as if an afterthought to an ebullient letter filled with plans for the coming Provincetown season. In this and in later correspondence, he displays none of the bitterness or regret about The Spring’s run, which critics have come to assume was a central reason for his departure for Greece five months later.

Helen Deutsch and Stella Hanau’s book was written at the same time as Kenton’s, but has a very different purpose. In it the pair, who began their association with the Provincetown Players near the end of its history and stayed on to work for the Experimental Theatre which followed, attempt to place both theaters under one imprimatur: the Provincetown. They tend to glorify the early days of the Players and the spirited leadership of Cook as avatars for the later theater. However, in their assessment, after 1921, “the days of inspired frenzy were gone; the first phase of the Provincetown had almost run its course” (80). They conclude that the end of the Players was caused by the nature of the group and the character of its director, Cook. “He was too real an artist not to see that as an artist he had failed, and that his ideal theater had somehow fallen short of the stars” (89). Unlike Kenton, they completely omit the dissension, which swirled around the question of who would direct The Hairy Ape. Instead, in keeping with their intention to provide a seamless whole to the history they weave—the Experimental Theatre crossing to a Promised Land that the Provincetown Players was not equipped to enter—they argue that the Players was essentially a product of “l’époque, le pays, and le milieu” (58). It had simply run its course:

The drive and acumen necessary for expansion and professionalism were lacking. Behind them lay the glamorous past, already made more lovely by the mist of retrospect; before them lay a situation which they were temperamentally ill-equipped to meet. They were a group of artists and writers, and this very fact, which had made them unique and fruitful, made it impossible for them to pursue the course which success had opened for them. (89)

Robert Sarlós’s study is the only published academic history of the Provincetown Players to date.³ With no apparent vested interest in a particular historical slant, he can stand back and offer a range of answers to explain the theater’s demise. His book’s title, Jig Cook and the Provincetown Players, reveals his approach: a discussion of the Players as a reflection of the man who did most to shape it. In addition to mentioning the uptown move of Jones, Sarlós cites the failure of The Spring, and the “losing battle” over the direction of The Hairy Ape which made Jig leave, the latter event creating “the emotional wound inflicted by O’Neill’s ruthless, yet for purposes of the playwright’s genius, fully justifiable procedure” (141). Calling Cook and O’Neill “these former brothers in Dionysos” (148) no longer able to work together by 1922, he lays the failure finally at the feet of Cook, whose “fundamental error was his unwillingness to accept popular success as an indication that the experiment had profitably been completed” (141). He also argues, “If there was a continuous flaw in the group’s operation, it was its consistent unpreparedness for the consequences of its action. In fact, the lack of sober planning was probably the single aspect in which the group had remained totally and completely amateur” (159).

While there is certainly some truth in all these postmortems and others put forward in these studies—such as Cook’s failure to interest investors in his “Dream Theatre” and in the repertory company that would perform there; the lack of new, exciting plays to produce; and the failure of the company to establish an ongoing organization—I believe that the authors tend to look for clues at the wrong end of the time line. The elements that led to the disbandment of the Provincetown Players were evident from the inception of the group; indeed, the outcome was inevitable. From its beginnings, the Players sought to fulfill two seemingly incompatible goals: to remain amateurs, motivated by a collective group ethos dedicated to the needs of serious individual playwrights who wished to develop their own talents. The Players would be, as Cook imagined the group, “a beloved community of life-givers,” putting on plays both for the fun of it and for the higher love of beauty. At the same time the theater would become a serious laboratory in which playwrights could test their ideas, free of all restraints, even the need for popular success. If they remained committed amateurs, how would they develop the skills needed for playwrights to mature in their craft? If dedicated to communal enterprises, how would they serve the individual writer above all others? If seeking fun, how would they at the same time be true to the highest calling of art?

For Cook, a self-proclaimed Guru from his early days in Iowa, whose greatest joy derived from inspiring others and bringing out the best that was in them (the theme of The Spring), such inconsistencies probably were not apparent, and certainly would not have deterred him. He would make “it” happen, whatever the particular “it” of the moment happened to be: putting on plays for fun; forming an integration of life and art patterned on ancient Greek models; producing professional playwrights. This was the nature of the man. It was also the nature of the Greenwich Village period, which fostered the Provincetown Players’ experiment. None of the studies of the theater company, even Sarlós’s, pays sufficient attention to how closely the goals of Jig Cook for the theater mirror those espoused in the period in which the Players first began, Greenwich Village 1915. More than most, Cook’s character encapsulated the spirit of the time: contradictory, youthful, joyous, rebellious, and visionary. If these were his failings, they were failings of the period as a whole.

The contradictions inherent in the conception of the Provincetown Players were not unique to the theater company; they sprung from the cultural ferment in Greenwich Village in the first two decades of the century. It was a time when everything was new and anything was possible, even contrary purposes. Susan Glaspell, at the end of her 1915 novel, Fidelity, has her hero, Ruth Holland, leave the Midwest and her lover and head to New York, to a new world that was in the making:

There were new poets in the world; there were bold new thinkers; there was an amazing new art; science was reinterpreting the world and workers and women were setting themselves free. Everywhere the old pattern was being shot through with new ideas. (269)

Besides, Holland adds, in New York City—unlike Freeport, a fictionalized Davenport, Iowa, Glaspell and Cook’s hometown—all was fluid, “Nothing is mapped out” (413).

To the critic Van Wyck Brooks, such an inchoate whirl of forces might be likened to a vast Sargasso sea, but the very openness and lack of boundaries was seen by most as the period’s most important, defining element, and a continuation of the spirit embodied in the man who became the symbol of this new age: Walt Whitman. Although dead twenty years, Whitman was still remembered at an annual dinner in his honor at the Brevoort Hotel, and discussed in lectures his biographer Horace Traubel gave at the Liberal Club, the meeting place for Village intellectuals. Floyd Dell, a central Village character and, along with Cook and Glaspell, a fellow Iowan, called Whitman “the great liberator,” who “freed us—from whatever chains most irked” (Vagabondage 117). Whitman’s famous dictum—“if I contradict myself, very well I contradict myself”—emblazoned Mabel Dodge’s writing paper at Villa Curonia in Florence, even before she arrived in Greenwich Village; shaped the photographer and curator Alfred Stieglitz’s belief that “a static consistency is contrary to life,” (qtd. in Norman 178) and framed Susan Glaspell’s later contention that biography could not be neatly packaged since “life, too, is combinations that baffle classification” (Road xv). The French painter Marcel Duchamp, who sought a temporary home in New York at the outbreak of World War I, gave the idea a Dadaist twist: “I force myself to contradict myself so as to avoid conforming to my own tastes” (qtd. in Green 14). Ex­philosophy instructor turned editor Max Eastman said that he shaped the editorial policy of the radical journal the Masses after the model provided by Whitman: eclectic, physical, celebratory; and Jack Reed, who was responsible for writing the actual manifesto printed on the masthead—just as he would later be charged with writing the constitution for the Provincetown Players—declared that the magazine would be “sensitive to all new winds that blow, never rigid in a single [. . .] phase of life. [. . .] And if we change our minds about it, well—why shouldn’t we.” Even Eugene Debs, who ran as Socialist party candidate for President in 1900, 1908, 1912, and 1916 referred to “the divine Walt,” who was not bounded by dogma.

The bardic yawp drowned out the Progressive bugle in Greenwich Village, and the sound resounded outward from there. As Floyd Dell recognized, “we had something which it seemed all bourgeois America—sick to death of its machine-made efficiency and scared respectability—wistfully desired to share with us: we had freedom and happiness” (Love 298-99). He could have added two other qualities: youth and play.

When Hutchins Hapgood, journalist and founding member of the Players, delivered the commencement address to his 1893 graduating class at Harvard, his subject was “The Student as Child,” a talk in praise of those virtues of naïveté and wonder, present in youth but too often lost through experience and age. To keep that sense of wonder alive became Hutch’s life-long goal; and many others with whom he came into contact in the Village shared it. “He who once learned the art of being young can never grow old,” the so-called tramp poet Harry Kemp proclaimed, and illustrated by never holding a paying job, traveling around the country and abroad as a stowaway, and “camping out” in various dune shacks he would discover around Provincetown. He died in the early 1960s still proud to say that he had never worked a day in his life. Jig Cook was another who retained “the art of being young,” willing and able to launch into each new enthusiasm, dreaming his childhood fantasy of Greece with such intensity that it finally materialized.

Floyd Dell eventually “grew up,” married, moved to the suburbs, had children, and, during World War II, even went to work as a bureaucrat in Washington. From this “adult” perspective, he may have slanted his 1933 autobiography, Homecoming, when he criticized his old Davenport friend, Cook, saying that while in Davenport he had been Jig’s lost youth, in Greenwich Village Jig eventually became his, a man too easily moved by his youthful passions, and whose excesses now proved embarrassing (Love 255). Yet, in 1925, when Dell wrote the series of articles “The Rise and the Fall of Greenwich Village,” he looked back at 1913 and recognized that what marked it as special were the qualities of youth and exuberance it displayed: “I saw ourselves, in retrospect, as touched with a miraculous naïveté, a Late-Victorian credulousness, a faith, happy and absurd, in the goodness and beauty of this chaotic universe” (320-21).

One of the hallmarks of the great outpouring of creativity, which Dell describes, was the sense that one could try new things. One could be a lawyer like Lawrence Langner and Louis Untermeyer, a doctor like William Carlos Williams, a dentist like Saxe Commins, and still write plays and poetry, or serve as editor and critic. One didn’t have to have “studied it.” The great call of the time was for “amateurism,” a word not then pejorative. The Amateur was seen as a corrective to the Progressive-era “Professional,” that is, a person who had absorbed the standard training in a field and had been certified by some conventional institution and been deemed an expert. The Professional was Belasco, was Broadway, was traditional painting before the Armory Show. In Chicago, Margaret Anderson had announced, “I have none of the qualities of the editor; that’s why I think the Little Review is in good hands.”

It was the word “amateur,” as much as the words “contradictory,” “youthful,” and “playful,” which defined the age and the Provincetown Players. Deutsch and Hanau use it repeatedly, when describing the Players:

It was this beginning in the truest amateur spirit which established the character of the group. They were not, for one thing, people of the theater; they were not professional actors or professional playwrights; they had no attitudes or dogmas gathered from the stage. They were novelists, journalists, painters, sculptors, teachers and architects, destined most of them to be successful in their own fields. (6)

The pair are correct in their assessment. With the exception of Eugene O’Neill and Susan Glaspell, those who contributed plays to the Provincetown Players in their eight-year history—two summers in Provincetown, six in New York— were for the most part, like Blanche DuBois, merely passing through. Amateurs to theater, they wrote plays because it was fun and they wanted to, and when they didn’t want to any longer they went on to other things. In fact, if one looks through the lists of participants, which they and Sarlós provide, one thing becomes apparent: virtually none, with the exception of O’Neill, continued to work full time in the theater. They tried it, succeeded or failed, and then tried something else. Before the end of the first New York season, Eastman and Hapgood had left; Dell, Louise Bryant, Reed, and Neith Boyce, all part of the original group, soon followed. When new talents emerged, such as Edna St. Vincent Millay and Djuna Barnes, their tenures were marked by experiment and some excellent work, but they too went on to other writing and other places. Even Glaspell, who would become as renowned as O’Neill in the Players, and be seen by critics as the equal justification for the existence of the group, continued to think of herself primarily as an amateur in the form. Theater got in the way of “my own work,” she once wrote her mother. Unlike O’Neill, she never “intended to stay.” Like the others, she too had drifted into the theater because it was there, first the Wharf Theatre then the converted stable on MacDougal Street. She became a consummate playwright, working over scripts for months at a time, trying to resist the prompting of Cook to produce a new work in a hurry for the next bill, as many others did. However, she usually described herself in interviews as a novelist who happened to write plays. After Cook’s death in Greece and her return to New York, the acrimony, which ended the original Provincetown Players, left her no ready theater waiting for her work; therefore, she naturally gravitated back to fiction, her first professional calling.

Although the original Players defined itself as an amateur group, writing for fun, that is not to say that its members were frivolous about theater or its potential. At the beginning of the Village revolution in 1913, Floyd Dell was in charge of play offerings at the Liberal Club, written by himself, which satirized life in Greenwich Village in general and his own skirmishes with love in particular. However the Abbey Players of Dublin, in its American tours in 1911-12, had already shown that a different kind of theater was possible. Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, featuring the artistry of Nijinsky enhanced by the costumes and scenery of Léon Bakst also reflected the paucity of American offerings, as did a run of works by the English playwright Harley Granville Barker. In comparison to these artistic achievements, the “Dell Players” was an embarrassment and led to the formation of a more serious group, the Washington Square Players, which began in February 1915. In its manifesto, it acknowledged the sad state of American theater up to that time and recognized that “a higher standard could be reached only as the outcome of experiment and initiative.” In order to find works of sufficient “artistic merit,” it indicated, “preference will be given to American plays, but we shall also include in our repertory the works of well-known European authors which have been ignored by the commercial managers” (Langner 94-95). In the small community of the Village, news traveled fast. Now that there was to be a serious theater, people began in earnest to write plays. Susan Glaspell and Jig Cook wrote Suppressed Desires, a parody of Freudianism, the latest craze to sweep the Village; Neith Boyce wrote Constancy, a drama based on the latest love affair between Mabel Dodge and Jack Reed; Reed himself wrote Freedom, an absurd farce on life in prison. However, even though each writer had close friends among the Washington Square Players group, including Lawrence Langner, Eddie Goodman, and Ida Rauh, their plays were rejected as “too special.” So, too, was a published manuscript entitled Thirst and other One Act Plays and a single played called Bound East for Cardiff, both submitted by an unknown young man whose father, James O’Neill, was a leading Broadway actor.

The rest, of course, is history. Cook, Glaspell, Boyce, and Reed—the rejected Washington Square playwrights—met in Provincetown in the summer of 1915 and put on their own plays, first in the Boyce/Hapgood living room, with the assistance of visiting stage designer Robert Edmond Jones, and later on Mary Vorse’s wharf. The next summer O’Neill joined the group, and as Glaspell tells the tale, “Then we knew what we were for.” “What they were for” she refrains from spelling out, saying simply that the group would start its own theater, produce plays never before performed, written only by Americans, and that it would do work “in the spirit of play” because the members wanted to. That seemed enough.

With O’Neill, the story was much different. It was probably not by chance that he happened to come to Provincetown in the summer of 1916. Agnes Boulton describes the Village at the time as “many people moving around here and there, but all in a small orbit” (43). O’Neill had spent the preceding winter frequenting Polly Holladay’s restaurant, where Cook and Glaspell often ate; and he made his famous trip to Provincetown in the company of Terry Carlin, an intimate friend of Neith Boyce and her husband Hutch Hapgood, who most likely told Carlin, and possibly O’Neill, of the great “fun” of the preceding summer. Although O’Neill became part of the Provincetown Players, since it afforded him what he needed—a place to experiment with the stage—he was clearly different from the others. They were not theater people, he was. He had grown up in the theater, studied dramatic form for a year, and by 1915 was already committed to becoming a serious playwright. For him the Provincetown Players was not a summer romance or a city adventure; not fun and games to fill time or to test talents before embarking on another career; not an act of community involvement or religious ecstasy. Theater was his profession, and he was determined to hone his skills. As long as the Provincetown Players could help him achieve this end, he remained part of the group. It was he who insisted at the group’s organizational meeting that the New York theater be called the Playwrights’ Theater, not the Tryout Theater as suggested. From the beginning O’Neill saw the theater as a place for the free development of the individual playwright. He simply omitted in his own definition the competing claim Cook broached: a community of amateur life-givers.

Both men revered Nietzsche, but only Cook attempted to live his words in daily life. In one of his yearly brochures for the Players Cook wrote: “One man cannot produce drama. True drama is born only of one feeling animating all the members of a clan—a spirit shared by all and expressed by the few for the all. If there is nothing to take the place of the common religious purpose and passion of the primitive group, out of which the Dionysian dance was born, no new vital drama can arise in any people” (Glaspell, Road 252-53). The form and ecstatic fervor reflect the attitude of Cook, certainly not O’Neill.

That is not to imply that O’Neill misled the Players or they him. As long as he was left to write and produce, without the necessity of joining too much in the group ethos, the association worked. It also worked on Cook’s part, for more than anything else, his commitment was to playwrights and their work, particularly O’Neill. It was Jig who worked ceaselessly to ensure the success of the first production of Bound East for Cardiff; who insisted that O’Neill come to New York when Ida Rauh as director wished to cut the ghosts from Where the Cross is Made; who was not deterred when he read The Emperor Jones, and immediately knew it needed a dome (the expensive Kuppelhorizont was currently in use in large, European opera houses), even though the construction would bankrupt the company. It was also Jig who cheered Gene on when he went the Broadway route with Beyond the Horizon. Broadway paid royalties; the Provincetown did not. Cook recognized this fact.

Yet, for all the good will on the part of Jig Cook and for all the attempts of O’Neill to accommodate to the group ethos, the dual mandates of the Provincetown experiment, just as the diverse natures of the two men, finally proved unbridgeable. By the middle of February 1922, it became clear to Cook that O’Neill was not going to allow him to direct The Hairy Ape, as he had directed The Emperor Jones. This time he was being pushed to the side to make room for a professional team, which would shepherd it to Broadway. Jig could no longer ignore the fact that the beloved community had failed to materialize. He might have stayed on as the titular head of the Players, allowing others to direct Ape, but he could not accept the rejection, not only of himself, but also of his vision for the Players. Susan Glaspell describes coming to the theater one day and finding her husband alone, with the curtain raised and a blue light, which he loved, trained on the dome he had built. As they sat together, much as they had sat on the wooden benches of their Wharf Theatre six years before, he told her, “It is time to go to Greece” (Road 311).

Earlier in her biography of Cook, she had offered an anecdote, which provides an explanation for why he could not accept either the rejection of his work or of his dream. She tells of Jig’s chance meeting in Chicago, in 1911, with a man who had shared a train compartment in Italy with him and two Italians eighteen years before. The four had been young, free-spirited students, looking for adventure, and had immediately bonded and decided to travel together for the next two weeks. Recognizing that probably age and necessity would dampen their fervor in years to come, they decided before parting to make a pact: when and if they should meet again, they would cheat time, by immediately picking up the conversation on which they were then embarked—the question of the superiority of Dante over Shakespeare. Thus would they illustrate that for them the fire of their youth had not been quenched, nor its memory. Therefore, eighteen years later, when Jig Cook, now a thirty-seven year old journalist in Chicago, spotted the man who had been his traveling companion, he immediately went over to him and without introduction began: “‘But the trouble about Dante. . . .’ Nothing happened; bewilderment, a cold look.” The man could not even remember the trip. For him, Glaspell explains, “Time won.” Not so for Jig. In 1911 he retained the enthusiasms and fire of that young man of 1893, who carried a paper on which he had written even earlier, “Life is one long-drawn death and we must burn out white and fierce and joyous!” (219-221).

This was the message Cook still believed in the spring of 1922, and helps explain why he could not brook the failure of his dream for the Provincetown Players, even though to others it appeared that it had achieved great success. The schism from the start had been between the amateur, beloved community of life-givers and the professional, individual playwright. The former had proven a failure, and for Cook that meant the entire experiment had failed. He described his feeling of defeat in a letter from Greece, addressed to Edna Kenton:

We promised to let this theatre die rather than let it become another voice of mediocrity.

I am forced to confess that our attempt to build up, by our own life and death, in an alien sea, a coral island of our own has failed. The failure seems to be more our own than America’s. Lacking the instinct of the coral-builders, in which we could have found the happiness of continuing ourselves toward perfection, we have developed little willingness to die for the things we are building, for the thing we love.

Our individual gifts and talents have sought their private perfection. We have not, as we hoped, created the beloved community of life-givers.

He concludes, “We keep our promise: We give this theatre we love good death; the Provincetown Players end their story here” (Road 309). Certainly The Hairy Ape was a great play, not mediocre, and Cook, more than most, recognized this. What he seems to label “mediocrity” is not the product but the process, and for him the process of creation was more important than its results.

What had failed in 1922 was his dream of an amateur collective, which probably never had a chance in the first place, or if it did, could only have flourished in that special soil cultivated in an earlier moment in Greenwich Village. The Provincetown Players eventually had to face the schism built into the theater, which stemmed from the exuberance and contradictions that marked its founder and was reflected in so many of the Village experiments. Rather than focusing on why the Provincetown Players disbanded, it seems to me that what should be noted is how long it survived, much longer than almost any other institution begun at the same time. The Liberal Club, Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery, Mabel Dodge’s salon, the radical journal the Masses, Emma Goldman’s anarchist magazine, Mother Earth, the Washington Square Players and the Neighborhood Playhouse had long since ceased functioning by 1922. Only the feminist group Heterodoxy weathered the Red Scare and the Jazz Age, finally ceasing in 1940 after 28 years. The wonder of the Provincetown Players is not that it ended in 1922, but that it made it until 1922 and made theater history in the process.

NOTES

1. A version of this article first appeared in Dialoguing on Genres: Essays in Honour of Andrew K. Kennedy, ed. Ulf Lie and Anne Holden Rønning (Oslo: Novus Press, 2001).

2. Kenton’s manuscript appeared first in the Eugene O’Neill Review 21.1-2 (Spring/Fall 1997): 16-160. McFarland Press published a revised version in book form last year that is reviewed in this issue of the journal.

3. Linda Ben-Zvi’s forthcoming Writings from the Verge: Susan Glaspell’s Life and Times (New York: Oxford UP) will present a new study of the Provincetown Players, 1915-1922.