Although Eugene O’Neill arrived on Cape Cod in 1916 having already written many of the works that he contributed to the Provincetown  Players, his experience with this group had a profound impact on his dramatic canon. Similarly, O’Neill’s Provincetown plays influenced the work being done by his colleagues in the company, even if they never achieved the theatrical stature he did. By looking at a small group of dramas by O’Neill and some of these lesser-known writers, I hope to explore the ways that ideas circulate among a closely knit group of artistic co-workers, how one dramatist’s theatrical motif can be appropriated and transformed by another writer, and why it is crucial to acknowledge O’Neill as part of the Provincetown Players, not just their fortuitous “discovery.”

The Provincetown was an artistic and intellectual community whose concerns mirrored those of the culture at large shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. Any number of contemporary controversies received theatrical treatment from a variety of perspectives, often on the same bill. In the spring of 1917, for example, audiences viewed O’Neill’s The Sniper, a bloody melodrama about war, alongside Rita Wellman’s Barbarians, a cynical spoof in which lonely women try to seduce enemy soldiers. Perhaps the number one topic of interest for the Provincetowners was the ever-changing relationship between men and women, and the plays themselves can be seen as part of a continuing dialogue about this very basic human bond. O’Neill’s Strindbergian monologue Before Breakfast (1916) and Alice Rostetter’s comedy The Widow’s Veil (1919) are provocative cases in point.

Like Before Breakfast, The Widow’s Veil—Rostetter’s only contribution to the Provincetown—was a popular success. It was included in the Review Bill (a revival of the season’s best work) in April 1919 and was subsequently presented for a six-day run at the Recital Hall in Newark, New Jersey. George Cram Cook and Frank Shay selected it for the collection of Provincetown plays they published in 1921. Interestingly, both dramatists “appeared” in their respective works: O’Neill supplied the husband’s hand that emerges from offstage in Breakfast, while Rostetter took the role of Mrs. Phelan in Widow’s Veil. An examination of the two short works—one unrelentingly grim, the other a black comedy—suggests two very different views of the marital state. While O’Neill depicted a man driven to suicide by the harridan he was forced to marry, Rostetter suggests (perhaps in response) that wives may have good reasons to wish themselves widows.

The set of Widow’s Veil is “a dumb-waiter shaft” that opens onto the kitchens of Katy MacManus and her apparently widowed neighbor, Mrs. Phelan. As in O’Neill’s play, the protagonist’s husband is offstage, in the apartment but unseen. Mrs. MacManus is a recent bride who fears that her spouse is dying. The most obvious humor arises from Mrs. Phelan’s inept attempts to comfort her young neighbor, for her cheerful conversation is dominated by references to death rattles, corpses, graves, wakes, departing souls and black-bordered handkerchiefs. Mrs. MacManus seems genuinely distraught at the thought of losing her marital partner until she tries on a widow’s veil lent her by Mrs. Phelan and discovers that the style is very becoming. By the next morning (this scene, like the O’Neill drama, takes place before breakfast) her husband has recovered and is bellowing loudly for newspapers, water, and meat. Mrs. MacManus gives the veiled hat to Mrs. Phelan and asks her to return it to its owner: “I’m thankin’ her for the loan and sorry I can’t be usin’ it” (31).

Widow’s Veil is a spoof of female vanity and neighborly nosiness, but it is also a mordantly anti-romantic view of love among the masses. Mrs. Phelan’s last comment on Mr. MacManus’s recovery is an exclamation of pity for his “poor, pretty young” wife (31). The appeal of widowhood in this dark comedy suggests that even for a ten-day bride, the honeymoon is over. In both Before Breakfast and The Widow’s Veil, nagging seems to be the lingua franca of marriage; what differs, of course, is who does the nagging— the wife (in Before Breakfast) or the husband (in Widow’s Veil). Rostetter invites us to see the world from the women’s perspective. Although Before Breakfast may be the closest he ever came to writing an all-female cast play, O’Neill scarcely does the same: his Mrs. Rowland is an alcoholic shrew who evokes no audience empathy.

Whether or not Alice Rostetter was consciously writing a reply to O’Neill’s depiction of marriage when she created her comedy, both plays are part of what Nicholas Radel calls the “complex intertext” of the Provincetown canon (31). Debates about issues ranging from the war on the sexual front to the war on the European front were played out on the Provincetown stage and beyond its borders. Recognizing the extent to which O’Neill’s work was part of this dramatic matrix helps us understand the complex roots of his dramas as well as the cultural climate that they reflected and helped create.

One of the Provincetown’s earliest offerings was Neith Boyce’s Winter’s Night, which appeared on the opening bill of the 1916 season. Powerful in its own right, Winter’s Night may have been one inspiration for Susan Glaspell’s most famous play, Trifles. Equally important, as Robert K. Sarlós recognizes, this rural domestic tragedy has surprising resonances with O’Neill’s first Broadway drama, Beyond the Horizon (21).

Winter’s Night is set in an isolated farmhouse. Rachel Westcott and her brother-in-law Jacob have just returned from the funeral of Daniel, Rachel’s husband and Jacob’s brother. Rachel has been a good wife—“I always did my duty by my husband” (42)—and despite the long illness that turned him bitter, Daniel Westcott was not an abusive spouse. Still, it is clear that Rachel, a woman whose greatest joy is making beautiful clothes out of bright fabrics, found the marriage unfulfilling: “I’m free now,” she announces, “I can have what I’ve always wanted—more life” (44). For her, marriage has not been the fulfillment of her dreams but the end, or at least the deferment, of them.

Winter’s Night in fact draws on two favorite (interconnected) O’Neill plots: the artist stifled by a dull marriage and the problem of two brothers in love with the same woman. In O’Neills version of the story—most fully realized in Beyond the Horizon—one brother is earthy and practical while the other is an artist/dreamer. The woman chooses the wrong one, the sensitive soul, and the result is his destruction. In Boyce’s variation, the problem isn’t that Rachel has married the wrong brother, it’s that she married at all; there is no “right brother” to choose. She is the artist whose dreams have been stifled by domesticity. The men in Winter’s Night fare no better than O’Neill’s heroes—Daniel is dead and the rejected Jacob shoots himself, sharing the fate of any number of sensitive O’Neill men from John Brown in Bread and Butter and Alfred Rowland in Before Breakfast to Orin Mannon in Mourning Becomes Electra. But our primary sympathies lie with the surviving woman, who asks only that she finally be given her chance to try to realize her dreams “beyond the horizon.”

It would be naïve to claim that Beyond the Horizon was O’Neill’s response to Winter’s Night—a sort of “I’ll show you who really suffers down on the farm”—or even that O’Neill had the earlier play in mind when he wrote his drama. But it would be equally naïve to ignore the context out of which Beyond the Horizon grew, the maelstrom of beliefs and practices current in the Greenwich Village milieu as well as the specific theatrical matrix of Provincetown plays. At the very least O’Neill was aware that there was more than one dramatic way to tell the story of the sensitive soul trapped in a destructive marriage. The fact that he chose to use and reuse (Before Breakfast, Bread and Butter, Beyond the Horizon, etc.) the same version reveals a great deal about the playwright and about his work.

In an essay tracing the possible roots of Beyond the Horizon in the plays of two American commercial theater stalwarts, James A. Herne and David Belasco, Brenda Murphy convincingly argues that Beyond appealed to audiences because the love-triangle plot was so familiar, yet the drama’s grim conclusion challenged “institutionalized values of the romantic love union and domesticity” (60). Where Herne’s and Belasco’s plays ended in marital bliss (the woman reconciled to her husband or the convenient death of the husband, which allows her to wed her true soul mate), the ending of Beyond the Horizon is revolutionary because it posits no such easy solution. I would suggest that while O’Neill’s work is revolutionary when compared to Herne’s and Belasco’s, it is in fact quite conventional when looked at in light of Boyce’s and even Rostetter’s. O’Neill may have challenged the staple theatrical notion, the dramatic “family value,” that love conquers all, but in the context of the Provincetown’s repertoire his plays are seen to hew rather closely to the popular belief that it is men who are trapped into, and in, marriage. O’Neill was a revolutionary—within limits.

One more exploration of O’Neill’s Provincetown environment may shed light on both his work and that of his contemporaries. Rita Creighton Smith’s The Rescue, originally written for O’Neill’s Harvard mentor George Pierce Baker and presented at the Provincetown in 1918, is a melodrama of repres­sion and madness. A young woman, Anna Warden, has returned to her family home in a small New England town after the death of her mother. Something is clearly wrong in this house: her aunt Elvira watches her warily, and it quickly becomes apparent that she fears Anna will, like her father and numerous other Warden progenitors, descend into madness. In an effort to set Anna free from the debilitating effects of her stifling home and her fears of turning out like her kin, the housekeeper tells Anna that she is illegitimate, hence not a Warden at all. Anna quickly packs her bags and heads off to a job in New York.

While the spirit of Freud was clearly in the air from the birth of the Provincetown, whose first bill included Glaspell and Cook’s spoof Suppressed Desires, it is interesting to note that The Rescue has some rather un-Freudian views of mental illness. While the Warden home—with “a great many things hidden away” (57)—is a model of repressiveness, the concept of insanity as a trait passed down from generation to generation was not one that particularly appealed to Freud. Equally fascinating (and also not especially Freudian) is the notion that worrying about going crazy may in fact drive one mad. While the ending of The Rescue is open, the implication is that Anna has at least a chance at a healthy life if she believes that she does.

All too often O’Neill (despite his disclaimers) has been pegged as a mindless follower, if not a victim, of Freud. Yet Smith’s emphasis on the roles of family inheritance, and fear of family inheritance, is replicated in two of O’Neill’s major plays: Strange Interlude and Mourning Becomes Electra. Both The Rescue and Strange Interlude refer to a mad aunt who lives or lived in the ancestral home, and in both the family history is recounted by old women who have been forced to care for their ailing kin. Finally, though in different ways, sex outside marriage is identified as a potential remedy: Kate decides that Anna would rather believe she is illegitimate than an heir to the Warden insanity, and Mrs. Evans suggests that Nina find a man other than her husband to father her baby.

Whether or not O’Neill got his idea for the Evans family history from The Rescue or was sipping from the same cocktail of Freudian and pre­Freudian spirits as Smith was, the fact is that O’Neill has not handled this element convincingly in Strange Interlude. Mrs. Evans believes that her husband went insane watching their son, Sam, for signs of the family curse, and she fears the same will happen to Sam. Unfortunately this makes little sense because he, rather incredibly, does not know about the family madness at all. Sam cannot worry about passing on a curse he’s never even suspected exists. The premises around which Rita Creighton Smith builds her effective short play become a minor plot device in O’Neill’s drama—and a plot device that, on close scrutiny, does not work.

O’Neill dealt more successfully with the issue of familial legacies in Mourning Becomes Electra. In The Rescue, the Wardens’ New England home is decorated with family portraits of elderly judges and governors—the same décor O’Neill uses in the Mannon sitting room. Anna’s mother, like Christine Mannon, loved flowers and “hated gloomy things”(56), but Anna wonders whether she has inherited any traits from her mother or is “all Warden.” She worries about her similarities to her pictured ancestors and is troubled by the neighbors’ suspicions; the Warden house, like the Mannon mansion, is a prison in which family members die, many of them (like Christine and Orin Mannon) by their own hand.

O’Neill, of course, takes this idea of physical, emotional and spiritual inheritance much further than Smith does. The judges and governors whose portraits line his walls are the source (and heirs) not just of familial insanity but also of a cultural perversion, a Puritan denial of life and love that dooms a whole class if not a whole nation. And no matter how hard a Mannon tries to believe she or he can escape this curse, they are “bound” to the Mannon home and ancestors. At the conclusion of The Rescue, Anna (the last Warden) relinquishes the sleeping pills with which she had planned to kill herself, as her forebears had, and walks out the door. Lavinia Mannon too renounces suicide—she will not go the way of her mother and brother—but only to immure herself in the family home. Even as qualified a “happy” ending as Smith offers is too sanguine for the fatalistic O’Neill.

I am not suggesting that the House of Warden, rather than the House of Atreus, was the model for the Mannons and their manse, but it is certainly possible that O’Neill was indebted to The Rescue for some of the ideas about inheritance that pervade Mourning Becomes Electra and/or for their visual realization on stage. At the very least we need to be aware that the roots of any great theatrical work are tangled and complex, and that we do both the Provincetown and O’Neill a disservice if we see his work as descending unmediated from ancient Greek or modern European theater, or even being plucked whole from his life.

The project of studying relationships between O’Neill’s plays and those of his Provincetown colleagues has largely been set in motion by Susan Glaspell scholars. Ann E. Larabee believes that The Emperor Jones “clearly borrowed from” concepts of otherness explored in Glaspell’s The Outside (79). Linda Ben-Zvi traces the possible influence of The Verge on O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape (“Cape[d] Compatriot” 135), while Marcia Noe identifies similarities between Trifles and O’Neill’s sea plays, particularly Ile (4-5). The focus now must be widened to include the entire Provincetown Players dramatic canon. As Arnold Goldman points out, for example, there are striking correspondences between several lines in Neith Boyce’s The Two Sons and the conversation between Edmund and Jamie Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night, written more than two decades later (306). Nicholas Radel argues that O’Neill’s plays must be considered in the “American intertext” of the Provincetown “whether we conceive of the relationship as one of direct influence or one in which a group of artists simultaneously challenge one another” to examine broad cultural constructs (40). We need to understand what kinds of intellectual and theatrical cross-fertilization occurred among these talented writers and to recognize how gender and class helped shape different stage renderings of similar subjects. In so doing, we will recognize the rich artistic environment that nurtured not only O’Neill’s plays but those of such neglected Provincetown contributors as Alice Rostetter, Neith Boyce, and Rita Creighton Smith.