Staging America: The Artistic Legacy of the Provincetown Players

By Jeffery Kennedy

A comprehensive history of the Provincetown Players and their influence on modern American theatre
 
The Provincetown Players created a revolution in American theatre, making room for truly modern approaches to playwriting, stage production, and performance unlike anything that characterized the commercial theatre of the early twentieth century. In Staging America: The Artistic Legacy of the Provincetown Players, Jeffery Kennedy gives readers the unabridged story in a meticulously researched and comprehensive narrative that sheds new light on the history of the Provincetown Players. This study draws on many new sources that have only become available in the last three decades; this new material modifies, refutes, and enhances many aspects of previous studies.

At the center of the study is an extensive account of the career of George Cram Cook, the Players’ leader and artistic conscience, as well as one of the most significant facilitators of modernist writing in early twentieth-century American literature and theatre. It traces Cook’s mission of “cultural patriotism,” which drove him toward creating a uniquely American identity in theatre. Kennedy also focuses on the group of friends he calls the “Regulars,” perhaps the most radical collection of minds in America at the time; they encouraged Cook to launch the Players in Provincetown in the summer of 1915 and instigated the move to New York City in fall 1916.

Kennedy has paid particular attention to the many legends connected to the group (such as the “discovery” of Eugene O’Neill), and also adds to the biographical record of the Players’ forty-seven playwrights, including Susan Glaspell, Neith Boyce, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Floyd Dell, Rita Wellman, Mike Gold, Djuna Barnes, and John Reed. Kennedy also examines other fascinating artistic, literary, and historical personalities who crossed the Players’ paths, including Emma Goldman, Charles Demuth, Berenice Abbott, Sophie Treadwell, Theodore Dreiser, Claudette Colbert, and Charlie Chaplin. Kennedy highlights the revolutionary nature of those living in bohemian Greenwich Village who were at the heart of the Players and the America they were responding to in their plays.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Jan 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9780817394226

Book preview

STAGING AMERICA

STAGING AMERICA

The Artistic Legacy of the Provincetown Players

Jeffery Kennedy

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2023 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Garamond Premier Pro

Cover image: Charles Frederick Ellis, At Christine’s; used with the permission of the Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Holly Peppe, literary executor, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Society, www.millay.org, all rights reserved Cover design: David Nees

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-2140-6

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9422-6

The book is dedicated to Arthur and Barbara Gelb, without whom this work would never have been completed and whose voices I hear every day.

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Staging of America

2. The Provincetown Regulars

3. Lulu and Susie

4. Jig

5. The Pendulum of His Spirit

6. Joining the Third Wave

7. Gathering at Land’s End

8. Evangelizing for a Native Stage

9. The Great Provincetown Summer

10. We Knew What We Were For

11. Organizing Revolutionists

12. The Greenwich Villagest Part of Greenwich Village

13. What Is Experimental?

14. A Sense of Direction

15. War and The People

16. The Clash of Ideology and Practicality

17. The Poetry of Revolt

18. A Bright Ripple on a Black Wave

19. Unorganized, Amateur, Purely Experimental, but Still Standing

20. Here Pegasus Was Hitched

21. The Greatest Moral Show on Earth

22. The Cause Lives On

23. Season of Youth

24. The Need for Exorcism

25. The Emperor Reigns

26. The Fallout from Success

27. On The Verge

28. Giving a Good Death

29. Poet of Life, Priest of the Ideal

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures

FIGURE 1 The Cabin, the Cook home in Buffalo, Iowa, circa 1942

FIGURE 2 George Cram Cook and Susan Glaspell

FIGURE 3 Lewis Wharf, Provincetown

FIGURE 4 Lewis Wharf on fire, July 6, 1916

FIGURE 5 Bound East for Cardiff on Lewis Wharf, July 1916

FIGURE 6 Eugene O’Neill’s Thirst on Lewis Wharf, August 1916

FIGURE 7 Enemies on Lewis Wharf, August 1916

FIGURE 8 A rehearsal of David Pinski’s The Dollar in the Playwright’s Theatre at 139 MacDougal Street

FIGURE 9 Much of the cast of Eugene O’Neill’s Bound East for Cardiff in front of the play’s set

FIGURE 10 Louise Bryant’s The Game, the first play performed at 139 MacDougal Street

FIGURE 11 John Reed at his desk with the Provincetown Players’ poster behind him

FIGURE 12 A scene from Lima Beans by Alfred Kreymborg

FIGURE 13 George Cram Cook and Edna James in Kenneth McNichol’s Pan, January 1917

FIGURE 14 John Sloan’s Arch Conspirators

FIGURE 15 Eugene O’Neill’s The Long Voyage Home

FIGURE 16 A scene from Mary Carolyn Davies’s play A Slave with Two Faces

FIGURE 17 A scene from The Athenian Women by George Cram Cook

FIGURE 18 The Other Players posing in costume at the front of the stage at 139 MacDougal Street, March 1918

FIGURE 19 Susan Glaspell’s Woman’s Honor

FIGURE 20 Interior of the Playhouse at 133 MacDougal Street

FIGURE 21 Eugene O’Neill’s The Moon of the Caribbees at 133 MacDougal Street, December 1918

FIGURE 22 George Cram Cook’s sundial created in 1918 in the backyard of 564 Commercial Street

FIGURE 23 Susan Glaspell’s Bernice

FIGURE 24 A rehearsal of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Aria da Capo

FIGURE 25 The Witch Doctor, Crocodile, and Brutus Jones in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, November 1920

FIGURE 26 Charles Gilpin as Brutus Jones in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, November 1920

FIGURE 27 Susan Glaspell’s The Verge, act 2, tower set, November 1921

FIGURE 28 Louis Wolheim as Yank, IWW scene in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, March 1922

FIGURE 29 Louis Wolheim as Yank in The Hairy Ape holding court in the stokehold with the other stokers, March 9, 1922

FIGURE 30 The grave of George Cram Cook in Delphi, Greece

FIGURE 31 George Cram Cook in Delphi, Greece, 1923

Acknowledgments

When a study covers as much material as this one does and has taken as many years to bring to fruition, there are many people to thank. Initially, the support of Dr. Lowell Swortzell and Nancy Swortzell at New York University was how the research for this began. I am also so grateful for having had the opportunity to work with NYU archivist Nancy Cricco. Dr. Lindsay Wright was both a realist and a friend and gave invaluable guidance and support, and Dr. Robert Landy stepped in at a crucial moment.

I am indebted to the librarians at the special collections and archives where I have had the privilege of conducting research. These include: Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library; Billy Rose Theatre Division at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center; Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University; University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Libraries Special Collections; University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections; Wright State University Special Collections and Archives; Fales Library, New York University Special Collections Center; Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University Special Collections Center; Newberry Library Special Collections—Midwest Manuscript Collection; Archives and Special Collections at University of California, Davis; University of Michigan Special Collections and Archives; Provincetown Public Library; Travis Bogard Archive, Tao House, Danville, California; and Monte Cristo Cottage Archives, Eugene O’Neill Center, New London, and Waterford, Connecticut, particularly Lois McDonald for her time and care.

I have been privileged to be part of an energetic and dynamic group of researchers and scholars in the Eugene O’Neill International Society, for whom I served as president from 2014 to 2015. Some of us have traveled the world together, we meet at conferences and festivals as often as possible, and the support of these dear friends has kept me going in more ways than they know. We have discussed research, given advice, listened to each other’s papers, found creative ways to teach O’Neill, published in our journal, gone to the theatre, and always found a way to have a great meal! These dear friends include Brenda Murphy and George Monteiro, Jackson R. Bryer, Beth Wynstra, Zander Brietzke, Robert M. Dowling, Kurt Eisen, David Palmer, Judith E. Barlow, Alex Pettit, Thierry Dubost, Carol DeBoer-Langworthy, Sheila Garvey, William Davies King, Diane Schinnerer, Anne Fletcher, and Steven Bloom. A special thank you to Eileen Herrmann for belief, faith, and encouragement.

Likewise, the International Susan Glaspell Society members have gathered in wonderful and exotic places, and I appreciate their support very much. These friends include Emeline Jouve, Sharon Friedman, Linda Ben-Zvi, J. Ellen Gainor, and Noelia Hernando.

When it comes to the actual finishing of this book, including the nuts and bolts of the writing, fact-checking, creating structure, and keeping focused, I will never be able to thank Cheryl Black, Martha C. Carpentier, or Drew Eisenhauer enough. These three highly accomplished scholars are friends in the dearest sense, because they have been willing to tell me the tough stuff when I needed to hear it. Truly this volume would not have gotten to the finish line without you.

I am grateful to those who have been willing to read portions of this study or give advice about each new phase; these include Julia Thomson, Sharon Kirsch, Kathy Deson, Chuck Bolte, and the brilliant Y York.

I am blessed with friends who have endured this very long process with me and for whom my heart is full of appreciation and deep gratitude. These include my New York posse, Andrew Geha, Denise Wilcox, and Justin Robertson; listening and guidance from Arnold Lopez, Diane Dillon, and Gayle Cordes; long-term knowing and understanding from Chuck and Soozi Bolte; enduring colleagues Arthur Sabatini and Charles St. Clair; and the long-suffering, deep-listening, and always loving Ted and Kathy Deson, Robert Kolby Harper, Paula Palmer, and Julia Koetz.

Heartfelt thanks to Dan Waterman at University of Alabama Press for his belief and willingness to get it right.

Introduction

Late twentieth-century theatre scholar Mary C. Henderson declared that the Provincetown Players left a legacy unparalleled in the history of American theatre. While she is not alone in that estimation, she also points to some of the complications that tracing their legacy has created for historians. Largely as a result of [Eugene] O’Neill’s association with it, she writes, the Provincetown group over the years became suffused with mystique and legend. In the published memoirs of some of the founders, there is frequent disagreement. As an example, she notes, Some recall the activities as ablaze with rebellion and political radicalism; others thought of them as just so much recreation.¹

Within these few sentences, one can see the challenges of attempting to document the history of the Provincetown Players. Certain events—such as how Eugene O’Neill was discovered, why the original Players came to Provincetown, and the real reason why the Players ended after seven years—have succumbed to the embellishing of a good story in its retelling for dramatic purposes. Unfortunately, despite the mystique this creates, many accounts, even those in recent publications, have ignored contrary evidence or glaring inconsistencies and chosen instead to repeat the legends without further investigation. As Henderson infers, the differing memories of those who were there have led many scholar-historians to feel they must choose from among these accounts. She goes on to both identify an often-stated conclusion and then propose an alternative: O’Neill remains the crowning achievement of the Provincetown Players, but as his friend and associate Kenneth Macgowan has pointed out, they ‘found their justification, outside of O’Neill, in the creative spirit which the playhouse breathed on all who came within it.’ Applauding how their work spread beyond their home on MacDougal Street, Henderson writes, For all the little theaters that came after it, both in New York and abroad in the land, it represented, and continues to represent, the apogee of what can be achieved by an inspired band of amateurs.²

Seventy years after Macgowan’s statement, American cultural critic Robert M. Crunden proposed, The summer of 1916 [when the Players solidified their existence] may well have been the most important few weeks in the history of the American theatre, and certainly remains exceptional even in the much broader perspective of American modernism.³ In 2013, Todd London, the artistic director of New Dramatists, wrote that the Players were the birth of an experimental art theater upon whose foundations so many of our later companies would stand.⁴ Theatre scholar C. W. E. Bigsby proposes that "on November 3, 1916, Bound East for Cardiff opened not only the first New York season of the Provincetown Players, but also the history of twentieth-century American drama."⁵ Many scholars like these have concurred and unequivocally affirmed the Provincetown Players’ monumental importance to American theatre.

Perhaps the figure who has drawn the most diverse scrutiny and about whom there has been the most disagreement is the Players’ leader and founder, George Cram Cook. He is a complex figure, to be sure, yet his presence is seminal in every aspect of the Players. Partial views of the man and incomplete accounts of his influences often obscure his part in the Players’ artistic and organizational decisions. One of the major items that this study investigates is George Cram Cook’s legacy as the leader of the Provincetown Players and why, after a successful and significant career in other arenas, particularly as a writer and a critic, he would take on the creation and development of an experimental theatre company. After years of researching and writing about the Players’ work, I was compelled to find out what motivated Cook and what he saw as the potential outcomes of starting a theatre collective. How could it be worth the sacrifice? I wondered how Cook made his goals seem so significant that he could spark within some of the most radical minds and successful writers and artists in America the desire to create an amateur theatre with no financial payoff in sight. What was it about that time in America’s cultural and political life and in the bohemian freedoms pursued in New York City’s Greenwich Village that would make it the perfect incubator for a little theatre like the Provincetown Players to have an impact? I also wanted to know what in the trajectory of Cook’s life prepared him to take on the unlikely task of starting a theatrical venture in his forties, when he had not been much more than a spectator of theatre to that point.

I discovered that Cook’s primary motivation was a strong sense of cultural patriotism, spurred by his desire to see onstage a more realistic depiction of modern American life than had yet been portrayed. He wanted the American cultural identity and syntax that had begun in the modernist writings of the Chicago Literary Renaissance to be front and center in America’s theatres. With his love and scholarly knowledge of ancient Greek culture, he hoped to create a community that wedded theatre to the society as closely as he perceived ancient Athens had been able to achieve. He became convinced of the need for American playwrights to write new plays in the modern style, and he felt he could knowledgeably inspire them to do so. Born of a desire to create an environment to improve himself, the entire through line of Cook’s work and career had been teaching, encouraging, and inspiring writers. What this study reveals for the first time is that his career began by creating open spaces for writers in America to develop their work, even as a student conceiving and implementing the first creative writing club at the University of Iowa. After a year’s study at Harvard, he returned to Iowa to teach its first course in creative writing, using a unique workshop style that became the genesis of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, arguably still the most esteemed academic program in the country for creative writers as of this writing. He soon tried his hand at writing novels and was successful in the pre-twentieth century’s more Romantic style. He earned a literary legacy as the Friday Literary Review assistant editor, a supplement of the Chicago Evening Post. Through his criticism, he taught Americans what was and was not the best of the new realistic modernism in literature and why. However, what initially ignited the deeper calling that resulted in the Players came from experiencing the Irish Players’ performance when they were on tour in Chicago. This controversial theatre company had found an organic way to communicate true Irishness through its playwriting and acting styles, displaying onstage the depth of their country’s poetic soul wrapped in the simplicity of its human characters.

Cook knew immediately that this is what he wanted for America, unshackling the British influence prevalent in plays performed professionally and capturing his own country’s unique identity in the immediacy and emotional spectrum that the stage could provide. He also knew this meant finding American playwrights with modern literary sensibilities that would be able to write this kind of theatre, and he was acutely aware that not many yet existed. By observing other small theatre groups as they formed in Chicago and Greenwich Village, Cook found that none of them were willing to commit exclusively to developing new American playwrights. For him, the vacuum this created called to him to be filled. Finally, in the familial atmosphere created by the writers and artists that had begun to vacation together in Provincetown, on Cape Cod, and in the confidence and bliss of his new marriage to celebrated writer Susan Glaspell, Cook seized on a moment he had been waiting to recognize, and in the summer of 1915, the Provincetown Players were born. This study presents the arc of Cook’s life and work that prepared him for this significant task and how he successfully led this group.

Unfortunately, Cook used ill-chosen words at the end of the Players’ seven years to describe their failure, and, therefore, by association, many scholars have used his own words against him and labeled him a failure as well. Like most people, Cook made mistakes and had vices that affected him; but I believe this study shows that his legacy, as well as the Players’, is anything but a failure. Perhaps their most significant success is how deeply they influenced American theatre in the early twentieth century. This study will show Cook’s vision for American theatre, who contributed to his vision, and who fought against it, as well as the history of those who became, within the work of the Provincetown Players, the apogee of what can be achieved by an inspired band of amateurs.⁶ I will also address the legends that have remained about the Players’ story and present research that, in most cases, refutes them.

I first became aware of the Provincetown Players during my graduate studies in educational theatre at New York University. I took a course on Eugene O’Neill taught by our chair and O’Neill scholar Lowell Swortzell. Early in the semester, he told us about the unique little theatre where O’Neill began his New York career, located across Washington Square Park just west from where our class met. I was a teaching fellow in the program, and by the end of that semester, the university, which owned the Playhouse’s building, informed us they were initiating a refurbishment of the theatre so that our program might use it to produce plays, offer community programs, and teach courses in theatre. Dr. Swortzell asked if I would write a short history of the Playhouse for our next program newsletter, which I did; however, I found so much information that interested me that it quickly became two articles over two newsletters. Unknown to us, the dean of our college, Ann Marcus, had these articles reprinted and distributed to the entire school’s faculty at their next meeting. I was soon a member of a team charged with creating a small historical gallery to be built inside the refurbished Playhouse. Thus, in 1997, I began my journey of researching the Provincetown Playhouse and its first resident company, the Provincetown Players, who created the original theatre at 133 MacDougal Street in 1918.

During the summer of 1997, I could be found many days inside the Playhouse as construction began. I observed the spine of the building’s original structure from the 1850s, gathered old playbills caught in the slats of the floor as it was dismantled, and preserved multiple thick layers of paint that had been added to the walls over eighty years (and that I still possess today!). As I worked with NYU archivist Nancy Cricco, we realized that so much was needed to adequately tell the Players’ story; she suggested I write a short monograph, so we began creating this as well. In the process, I met many influential theatre artists who felt a deep connection to the Playhouse. The day after the grand reopening of the Playhouse in May 1998, I attended an event at which playwright Edward Albee was part of a panel, and afterward, I gave him a copy of the new monograph. He was shocked to hear the Playhouse had reopened and thrilled that we commemorated his play The Zoo Story, which made its New York premiere there in January 1960. That summer, a theatre company led by Stephen Kennedy Murphy performed a series of early O’Neill one-act plays in the Playhouse. Every night for weeks, I heard O’Neill’s words ring against the same walls where they were first spoken. I was also privileged to meet many O’Neill enthusiasts who came to enjoy and encourage this endeavor, including celebrated O’Neill actor Jason Robards (whose son was acting in the troupe).

That same summer of 1998, Dr. Swortzell and I founded and coproduced the award-winning New Plays for Young Audiences playreading series, attempting to revive and emulate the purpose and spirit for which the Playhouse was initially created; as of this writing, over two decades later, the series continues. I gave tours of the Playhouse for the Museum of the City of New York, the New-York Historical Society, and many Greenwich Village associations. I wrote a two-volume history of the Playhouse, subsequently created the research website www.provincetownplayhouse.com, have spoken at conferences all over the world about the Players, served a term as president of the Eugene O’Neill Society, hosted the O’Neill Society’s International Conference in the Playhouse, and have published many chapters and journal articles about the Playhouse’s history. As you can see, this theatre and its ghosts have been an intimate part of my life for some time.

I have three main goals in writing this new history of the Provincetown Players. First, I aim to provide an expanded biography of George Cram Cook. Cook’s life and work has elicited disparate and varied evaluations by many researchers, most of whom I contend have based their judgments on only partial biographical accounts. Here, I have sought to paint as complete a portrait of this multifaceted man as possible, including the wide range of his interests and predilections, which at times seem contradictory: from violin player to baseball addict, from failing pupil to fifteen-year-old college student, from bashful adolescent to pursuer of erotic delights, from the University of Iowa to Harvard, from professor of literature to novelist, from would-be soldier to leader of philosophical clubs, from truck farmer to literary editor, from well-to-do upbringing to bohemian scavenger, from Socialist candidate to literary rebel, from the Mississippi River to Provincetown Bay, and from inexperienced theatre producer to inspirer and director of works by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights Eugene O’Neill and Susan Glaspell. This study offers a chronological narrative of Cook’s life and work, utilizing letters, diaries, notes, attempted autobiography, Cook’s novels, plays, and poetry, stories from his friends, family, and detractors, and a biography of him by Glaspell. Acknowledging the ephemeral nature of much of what Cook’s work accomplished, Susan Kemper, in her dissertation on Cook, writes, The written words that he left . . . are pale beside the vivid quality of his conversation, or the charismatic nature of his personality.⁷ I come away from this study firmly believing that no one but Cook could have initiated the Provincetown Players and then maintained their experiment as long as he did with the resulting vital contributions to American theatre.

My second goal for this study is to integrate into the Players’ narrative the sizable amount of research newly available in the last three decades. This new material modifies, refutes, enhances, and expands many aspects of previous studies of the Players. It clarifies, solidifies, and sometimes even outright changes the company’s artistic history. With this in mind, I have added to the biography of each of the Players’ forty-seven playwrights and provided expanded contexts for their plays, in some cases giving the first detailed descriptions of them. I did not set out to write a new literary or theoretically based analysis of the Players’ work; however, I do assess the plays in terms of their theatrical, literary, political, philosophical, or social significance, as appropriate.

My third goal is to accurately and thoroughly assess the Players’ importance to American drama as they attempted to usher it into the modern era. I portray succinctly how the Players contributed to the development of American theatre and how they responded to their immediate world. Therefore, I have chosen to present additional historical context than what I have found in previous studies. For me, it is essential to understand what was happening in American theatre and Greenwich Village at the time leading up to and during the Players’ work. Also, I felt that knowing the radical philosophies, literary contributions, and lifestyles of those involved in the original core group of the Players, the Regulars as I call them, was vital to understanding the initial trajectory of the Players. Therefore, I expand the biographical information about the Regulars and how each found their way to Provincetown. When you look at even a partial list of those who significantly interacted with the Players, you realize you are considering an elite Who’s Who of writers, artists, and theatre practitioners of the early twentieth century in Greenwich Village. These include Susan Glaspell, Eugene O’Neill, Mary Heaton Vorse, Hutchins Hapgood, Neith Boyce, Wilbur Daniel Steele, Robert Edmond Jones, Max Eastman, Ida Rauh, Floyd Dell, Emma Goldman, John Dewey, Otto Kahn, Edna St. Vincent Millay, B. J. O. Nordfeldt, Charles Demuth, William and Marguerite Zorach, Harry Kemp, John Reed, Louise Bryant, Djuna Barnes, Berenice Abbott, Sophie Treadwell, Thomas Mitchell, Jacques Coupeau, Charlie Chaplin, Theodore Dreiser, Mike Gold, Ann Harding, and even a young Claudette Colbert.

Though this is not a genuinely interdisciplinary study, I attempt to keep the reader aware of the political and cultural world that the Players were living in and to which they were responding. For example, I note the Players’ reactions to the influenza (Spanish flu) pandemic of 1918–1919, which killed at least fifty million people worldwide, including many of their own members. Their artistic response was to perform Alice L. Rostetter’s play The Widow’s Veil. This darkly comic work portrays a young Irish wife who excitedly borrows a beautiful widow’s veil from her neighbor only to have to return it when her husband recovers from the virus. This example shows how an examination of historical context can significantly inform how one looks at the plays, an angle that has gone unnoticed in previous studies of the Players.

One of the gifts of these years of researching has been interacting with some of the great American theatre scholars of our time, many of whom I have been privileged to call friends. Their input and suggestions have been invaluable, and their generosity of time and encouragement has kept me going in this all-encompassing project during difficult days. In 2005, while in Provincetown at my first Eugene O’Neill Society Conference, I met Dr. Robert Sarlós, who wrote the seminal study Jig Cook and the Provincetown Players (1982). It took me the whole week to muster up the courage to introduce myself. I revered and respected him, but I also knew that I disagreed with some things he had written, based on my research at the time. When I timidly confessed this to him, he responded so graciously: That’s what this is about, Jeff! It’s your turn to tell the story now!⁸ His permission freed me to research and relay what I found without fear.

O’Neill biographers Arthur Gelb and Barbara Gelb kindly took me under their wing and, whether it was their intention or not, mentored me, though they never made me feel like their student but always like a friend. We first met in May 1998 at the reopening of the Playhouse inside the new historical gallery. Barbara enthusiastically shook my hand, saying, Finally, someone has told the story accurately! I let out a sigh of relief, particularly since I had become very familiar with their work and respected it so much. It would be another decade before we would interact again, meeting to plan the 2011 O’Neill Society Conference held in New York City, of which I was the conference chair. Since New York was their home (Arthur had been the managing editor of the New York Times), they had wonderful ideas for events and extraordinary presentations, many of which we ended up planning together. Our friendship continued for years, through countless emails, phone calls, lunches, dinners, even operas, having shared our research, our writing (they were working on their last O’Neill biography, By Women Possessed), and our lives. We certainly did not always agree; in fact, we loved the combat of drilling into historical detail, each making our case for why we thought we were right. In terms of advice, they continually made it clear that any suggestions they made were mine to embrace or reject, and they freely gave me their time and wisdom. What has endured from those years is their sincere and ongoing belief in me, and, though they are gone and I miss them terribly, I gratefully carry the warmth of their belief every day. Arthur, knowing I was voraciously working on this book, would continually say to me, You’re going to get one chance to tell this story; tell it well! To them and you, I offer this volume.

1

The Staging of America

The tension inside Hamlin’s Grand Opera House was palpable, creating both a nervous and an expectant feeling. The audience awaited the February 6, 1912, Chicago premiere of John Millington Synge’s controversial play The Playboy of the Western World, performed by the now-infamous Irish Players from Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. For weeks, the city anticipated trouble with the performance, after the play received strong disapproval at its New York, Washington DC, and Philadelphia premieres, resulting in disruptions and near-riots. Irish Americans had rejected the play’s plot of a young man trying to impress a woman by boasting he had killed his father, even in a slightly comic context. They claimed that a true Irishman would never do such a despicable thing and protested at the prior cities’ performances. Denunciations of the play and efforts to stop the local premiere filled the Chicago papers for weeks. In anticipation, there was a significant police presence in front of the theatre on Clark Street, which was opposite the city’s courthouse. Those with tickets entered cautiously and took their seats inside the large theatre’s plush interior, wondering who among them might be secretly planning to cause a disturbance. The houselights went down, the curtain rose, and everyone held their breath in anticipation. However, unlike in the previous cities, neither an egg nor a stink bomb was thrown, and there were no shouts of interruption or disdain. Instead, as the newspapers reported the next day, nothing but ripples of amusement and loud applause were heard.¹

While the feared explosions in the theatre did not take place that night, powerful detonations were going off in the minds of two literary men in the audience. Maurice Browne, born in England and a former Cambridge literature student, had been an itinerant teacher and a poet who followed Ellen Van Volkenburg from Italy to Chicago out of blind love for the beautiful actress. George Cram Cook was an Iowa native, celebrated author, and Harvard-educated literature and writing professor who was currently the associate editor at the Chicago Evening Post’s Friday Literary Review. Cook’s mission at the time, according to Browne, included "patiently trying to teach Chicagoans their literary alphabet through the columns of the Evening Post."² Irish Players’ actress Cathleen Nesbitt had asked her friend Browne to organize a friendly local militia to attend the plays in case there were disturbances, and among those he enlisted was Cook.³ Each of them experienced this company’s performance as what Chicago theatre critic Eric Delameter described as simple with a naturalness that almost seems carelessness.⁴ A few days later, Delameter recalled the Irish Players’ performance as utterly natural playing, this attempt at spontaneous interpretation—‘interpretation,’ not acting.⁵ What they observed was not the highly postured style typical on American stages, a faux-British impersonation with clipped diction that was celebrated whether the actors were performing Shakespeare or a George Broadhurst farce. Synge’s working-class dialogue framed in a stylized realism was a revelation, a combination of reality and poetry that felt distinctively new and, beyond the brogue, decidedly Irish. Neither Browne nor Cook had witnessed this onstage before, and it moved something in each of them, causing them to think about what might be possible for the American theatre.

America’s complicated relationship with the stage can be traced to its formation, first as a series of British colonies and then as a newly independent country. The Puritans saw theatre as part of the decadence of the British culture they were resisting and had come to the New World to avoid. Their prohibition continued in New England, where the theatre was considered immoral and a distraction from the important and vital quest for godliness.⁶ Puritan views permeated the culture in the American Northeast, and in 1774 the Continental Congress equated attending performances of plays with horse-racing, gaming, cock-fighting, . . . and other expensive diversions and entertainments, which they vowed to discountenance and discourage.⁷ They prevented any American who attended theatre during this time from running for Congress.

Once performances of plays became more prevalent in early America, the debate shifted to what was appropriate to perform on American stages. This debate would rear its head again in the twentieth century when plays were being considered in light of the government’s Espionage and Sedition Acts, laws that barred presenting anything that critiqued or disparaged the American government. Three things gradually helped to change attitudes among those in the Northeast toward the theatre: The first was the 1787 success of Royall Tyler’s comedy of manners The Contrast, which juxtaposed European mores with American tastes; the second was General George Washington’s love of theatre (he even staged plays to improve the morale of his troops during the terrible winter at Valley Forge); and the third was that an increasing number of Americans started writing plays.

Theatre soon reflected what it meant to be a citizen of the United States and was often a mirror of the country’s values. The arrival of Irish immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century contributed to a growing class consciousness, and this alienation fostered a division within American entertainments that became separated into respectable and working-class. Professional actors migrated to working at more reputable theatres, while the proliferation of popular entertainments, such as minstrel shows, extravaganzas, vaudeville, and burlesque, became the milieu of performers. The industrial revolution yielded a growing wealthy class in America that, when confronted with whom to emulate in their newfound affluence, surprisingly turned to British sensibilities to define themselves. Of course, this was the very culture their ancestors had rejected and from whom they fought to separate. These new Victorian mores further divided citizens into economic strata and projected cultural refinements (or lack thereof), with their respective entertainments following.

As the Civil War regionally ripped the country in two, the theatre played a role in forcing America to deal with its long-divided stand on slavery. Theatre in the north took on a socially charged tone, with productions of the extremely popular and spectacle-filled dramatizations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Tom shows featured white actors in blackface makeup, like the popular minstrel shows. Despite the well-meaning intentions that motivated Stowe’s abolitionist story, using blackface onstage led to negative stereotypes of African Americans, as more white citizens attended the stage versions than ever read Stowe’s novel. The significance of a theatre company that would finally invite African Americans to star in their plays would be considerable in light of this history.

Though most used bowdlerized texts, productions of Shakespeare’s plays formed the height of refinement in the legitimate American theatre. Writers of new American plays in the second half of the nineteenth century favored melodrama, which, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, presented sensationalized narratives. This style demarcated good characters from evil ones in exaggerated ways and employed equally exaggerated acting styles and stage effects to build to a play’s spectacular ending, designed to appeal to the emotions. Theatre in America toward the end of the nineteenth century was more a sensory than a literary medium, providing audiences with a thrilling and entertaining experience rather than something more subtly human that provided individual catharsis or social efficacy, as was becoming the trend in Europe.

After great success writing melodramas, American playwright James A. Herne attempted a more realistic style at the end of the nineteenth century with his tragic Margaret Fleming (1890), only to have it rejected by the public and most critics. Herne wrote in an 1897 article titled Art for Truth’s Sake that art should seek to emphasize humanity and to express some large truth.⁸ He believed, as did William Dean Howells, the Dean of American Letters, before him, that drama was a serious mode of expression and had a higher purpose than mere amusement. Herne ends his article by stating that truthful art perpetuates the everyday life of its time, because it develops the latent beauty of the so-called commonplaces of life, because it dignifies labor and reveals the divinity of the common man.⁹ Herne was looking ahead to what he hoped would be the beginnings of modern American drama, but he did so without a following or the ability to make it happen.

From the end of the nineteenth century into the twentieth, American theatre was becoming big business. A touring circuit, often featuring international stars of the stage, benefited from the building of a coast-to-coast national railway system, allowing producers to expand beyond the prime urban centers of the East Coast. However, growing chaos in booking theatres, particularly for traveling companies between large engagements, caused six theatre owners to form what became known as the Syndicate.¹⁰ In 1896, this group created a monopoly by combining their thirty-three theatres into a network and controlling the routes that companies could book; by default, this allowed the owners to determine what plays these companies performed. This control brought prosperity to the Syndicate owners and their participating theatres, and some would argue it organized the touring of works by the country’s leading playwrights. Nonetheless, actors and other managers felt exploited by being told what, when, and how to perform. However, almost all who resisted were eventually bought by the Syndicate, who offered them sizable sums in exchange for their acquiescence. The real artistic damage was that the monopoly was interested only in producing plays that would create big profits, not in moving the medium forward or encouraging playwrights to develop in literary ways, despite European theatre’s movement in this direction. Those who challenged the monopoly most effectively were the theatre critics, though the Syndicate attempted to control them by threatening to remove advertising from their publications, often coercing an editor to grudgingly endorse their plays.

One critic who took a strong stand against the Syndicate was Norman Hapgood. He wrote that nothing does more than the existence of this powerful association to prevent the growth of American drama; by this, he meant preventing the introduction of new playwrights and new actors who did not have the proven track record required for the Syndicate’s financial quota.¹¹ Hapgood was familiar with the move toward realism in Europe, notably by Norwegian Henrik Ibsen, whose plays of ideas examined societal values and used psychological motivation for characters even before Freudian theory. Ibsen also removed melodrama’s conventions of asides and soliloquies and refused to submit to happy endings. His characters were, on the whole, ordinary people, and yet great human discoveries came from them when placed in dire circumstances. Ibsen’s plays, such as A Doll’s House and An Enemy of the People, were not spectacles but human journeys of individuals who chose to live according to their beliefs. Hapgood saw this type of drama as the goal toward which American playwrights needed to move.

One of two highly influential books published about the state of American theatre at the turn of the century was Hapgood’s The Stage in America 1897–1900. Harvard-educated and having worked at some of the country’s most influential newspapers, Hapgood was a seasoned theatre critic. Hoping American playwrights would listen, he wrote: The greatest literary ideas are dramatic ideas; most of the world’s highest literature is poetry, and most of its highest poetry is drama. We need not fear that modern times are undramatic, for artistic genius is creative, and when it exists it will create somewhat in its universal manner.¹² Hapgood’s theatre criticism pushed American playwrights toward creating realism with a literary quality that audiences in Europe, and soon Russia, were applauding.

The other important book about the state of American theatre at the turn of the century was Emma Goldman’s The Social Significance of Modern Drama. In 1885, the sixteen-year-old Lithuanian-born Goldman immigrated to the United States. A year later, she became an anarchist and political activist in response to the violent Chicago Haymarket Square Riot between organized labor and police. She soon evolved into a firebrand and theatrical speaker, sometimes attracting thousands to her speeches. She was labeled Red Emma and began lecturing on national tours about free speech, women’s equality, birth control, and organizing labor unions. Because of the size of the crowds she drew, Goldman became notorious and was feared by many political figures and police captains when she visited their cities.¹³ For years, she would be automatically implicated in any rebellious political action, particularly violent ones. The police tried linking Goldman to Leon Czolgosz, who shot President McKinley in 1901, even though her only connection to the incident was that the assassin had attended one of her lectures.

Goldman began speaking on modern drama in 1907 and, seven years later, was invited to give a six-week series of lectures at the Berkeley Theatre in New York City. Her ideas about theatre began developing in 1904 after her association with Julius Hopp’s Progressive Stage Society, created to combat the evils of the capitalistic stage, and secondarily to give entertainment to its members. The company thought the public should have an opportunity to see the real drama of life as they understand it, instead of the flimsy caricatures generally given.¹⁴ In 1905, Goldman served as a translator and short-term manager of Pavel Orlenoff’s Russian theatre troupe when they came to the United States. She became convinced that modern drama had the power to effect social change because it mirrors every phase of life and embraces every strata of society . . . showing each and all caught in the throes of the tremendous changes going on, and forced either to become part of the process or be left behind.¹⁵ In other words, Goldman believed that theatre could be a political act. She folded some expanded commentary into the transcriptions of her Berkeley Theatre lectures, and the result was The Social Significance of Modern Drama, published in 1914.

Goldman analyzes in her book the social aspects of the work of significant playwrights by region or country. However, she is unable to cite any American plays or playwrights, convinced that at that time in America, political pressure has so far affected only the ‘common people.’ However, she felt that modern drama had the potential to arouse the intellectuals of this country, to make them realize their relation to the people, to the social unrest permeating the atmosphere.¹⁶ While not all dramatic critics wholeheartedly embraced Goldman’s analysis, most believed her cause was worthy, and the book had a significant effect. Critic Van Wyck Brooks writes, No one did more to spread the new ideas of literary Europe that influenced so many young people in the west.¹⁷

If nothing else, Goldman and Hapgood pointed to the disparity in American playwriting that begged for literary and socially significant plays. However, professional American playwrights and their producers were still primarily concerned with commercial success, even after the Syndicate’s dismantling in 1910. To fill this gap, Little theatre companies began to organize in major cities. Among the first was a group at the Hull House settlement in Chicago, founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr. Winthrop Ames began another in Boston called the Toy Theatre. These companies rejected the need for Broadway-scale productions, performing in smaller spaces that allowed them to keep expenditures low and forced them to depend on faithful audiences.

Maurice Browne’s response to attending the Irish Players’ performance was to push forward on beginning a new little theatre company in Chicago, something he and Van Volkenburg had been contemplating. They discussed their plans with Lady Gregory, the Irish Players’ sixty-one-year-old manager and playwright who was traveling with them, and she counseled: By all means start your own theater; but make it in your own image. Don’t engage professional players; they have been spoiled for your purpose. Engage and train, as we of the Abbey have done, amateurs: shopgirls, school-teachers, counter-jumpers; cutthroat thieves rather than professionals. Then she added, And prepare to have your hearts broken.¹⁸

In her biography of George Cram Cook, The Road to the Temple, Susan Glaspell describes Cook’s profound experience of witnessing the Irish Players: Quite possibly there would have been no Provincetown Players had there not been the Irish Players. What he saw done for Irish life he wanted for American life—no stage conventions in the way of projecting with the humility of true feeling.¹⁹ Glaspell’s statement is essential to understanding Cook’s motivation in moving forward. First, Cook’s only involvement in theatre to this point, other than as a frequent audience member, was as the coauthor of a Civil War play with Charles Eugene Banks. However, watching the Irish Players triggered something inside him that was specific to the stage, not just the literature he had been so heavily involved with as a professor, writer, and now critic. What he saw, and, perhaps more importantly, what he felt, was No stage conventions in the way, referring to the lack of melodramatic style. Instead, he saw the Irish Players use a more naturalistic approach to acting that was rarely seen on American stages. The no stage conventions also referred to the lack of emphasis on spectacle; producers at the time typically wrapped melodramatic plays in visual opulence.

Once these conventions were removed, as the Irish Players endeavored to do, what remained were the playwright’s words in a purer state, allowing the emotions conveyed by the actors to be projected with the humility of true feeling.²⁰ Authenticity. In a sense, Cook was refuting even the Romanticism with which he wrote his own popular novels, though he had set his most recent, The Chasm, in a Socialist political milieu. Something internally clicked as Cook watched the Irish Players, something he had been seeking, something he had not experienced anywhere else, and something he desperately wanted for the American stage. Cook felt he had witnessed an Irish company performing a style honed to be thoroughly Irish in tone, language, topic, and performance; they were staging Ireland, if you will. The seed was planted in his mind that night: If this was possible for Irish theatre, there had to be a way to do the same toward staging America.

William Archer is significant in early twentieth-century theatre as a tireless and celebrated critic in England and the United States. He was one of the first to champion and translate the uniquely modern plays of Ibsen, the Norwegian father of realism. King’s College London invited Archer to give two series of lectures on drama, later published in 1923 under the title The Old Drama and the New. In them, he summed up the new work that he contended had revolutionized British theatre at the beginning of the twentieth century: the plays of Harley Granville-Barker, George Bernard Shaw, and John Galsworthy. Archer claimed that these works were exemplary of the final stage of the progress . . . [which] would have been impossible but for idealistic effort. Some people actually put down money; others gave work and thought either for nothing or for a mere living wage, renouncing all hope of the great prizes of theatrical speculation.²¹ He attributed this principle of enthusiastic labor and sacrifice to the movement that then spread to the provinces and Ireland. He believed that progress would have stopped dead if drama had been left to do its best under purely commercial conditions.²² Archer compared this to the situation in America, where the outburst of dramatic instinct and ambition has been no less marked and widespread . . . though it has taken somewhat different forms. By this, he was referring to the little theatres and community theatres begun throughout the country, which he felt had produced playwrights of notable talent. He cites explicitly as more notable because more distinctively American the work of the Provincetown Players.²³

The Provincetown Players was the only little theatre group in New York City whose goal was to give voice to new American playwrights exclusively. At least initially, they also strove to remain an amateur entity so that commercial pursuits would not taint their theatrical experimentation. Many in the company, most notably their leader Cook and his wife, Susan Glaspell, modeled Archer’s principle of enthusiastic labor and sacrifice, setting other pursuits aside to concentrate on fulfilling the group’s mission. Archer ultimately recognized the seminal importance of the Provincetown Players, stating that it is in the hallowed ground in the region of Washington Square or Greenwich Village, or . . . among the sand dunes of Cape Cod—we must look for the real birthplace of the American drama.²⁴

As led by Cook, the Provincetown Players’ unique contributions changed the course of American theatre in the early twentieth century, and their legacy includes ushering American drama into the modern era. This feat is surprising when one realizes that most of the Players’ initial core group had never worked directly in theatre before. Instead, they were fiction writers, journalists, and visual artists who desired to see the aesthetic changes taking place in modern literature and visual art affect the American stage. They produced genuinely experimental plays, sometimes exploring new European styles but imbuing them with a distinctively American tone; these styles included Expressionism, Futurism, and Surrealism. The Players did not want to stage the European examples of these styles, as others were beginning to do, but instead to create new American plays that experimented with their traits. They produced poetic and verse plays, feminist plays, allegorical plays, and plays that displayed lower- and middle-class Americans and immigrants. As a result, they quickly became a beacon for the little theatre movement throughout the country; these smaller theatres that sprang up in cities all across America were also committed to presenting new plays and very often programmed the same plays performed by the Players.

In their pledge to present new plays by American writers, the Provincetown Players launched two highly significant American playwrights. One was Susan Glaspell, who wrote subtle yet powerfully complex women as lead characters. Without a pulpit-thumping approach, she became one of the era’s greatest feminist playwrights and bridged the Victorian era with the modern. Already a nationally celebrated novelist and short story writer, Glaspell wrote a satirical play on Freudian dream interpretation with Cook, titled Suppressed Desires, and they presented the play in 1915 at the first informal gathering of what would become the Provincetown Players. It was their first play written together, and it both questioned the misuse of the newest psychological trend and commented on how Greenwich Villagers were obsessed with the new. Glaspell would soon expand her subject matter, tapping into her journalistic past to give a feminist look at a murder mystery in Trifles, which remains one of the most anthologized one-act plays in the American canon. Like Trifles, her first full-length play, Bernice, contains an unseen main character, forcing the audience to hear others’ varied perceptions to assemble the absent character’s traits.

Critics hailed Glaspell’s plays until she began creating more assertive female characters, which are particularly dominant in Inheritors and The Verge. These early modern experiments in political drama and Expressionism confused male critics, who dismissed the plays, unable to see their point. Nine years after the Players performed the last play she gave them, Glaspell won the 1931 Pulitzer Prize in Drama for Alison’s House, inspired by the life of Emily Dickinson. Despite that success, she would almost disappear from theatrical consciousness until the radical feminist movement of the 1970s rediscovered her plays.

Cheryl Black’s essential work, The Women of Provincetown, 1915–1922, makes the indisputable case that the Players were the theatrical purveyor of first-wave feminist theatre. This accomplishment was achieved not only by placing many women in artistic and managerial positions but also because of the messages and points of view presented in their plays. Many female Players were leading feminist activists in Greenwich Village, committed to various women’s progressive organizations supporting equality, the vote, and birth control.

The other prominent playwright whose career began with the Players was Eugene O’Neill. After having his play Bound East for Cardiff produced by the group in the summer of 1916, O’Neill quickly became one of America’s most consequential playwrights. O’Neill challenged the status quo of language in American plays, presenting characters whose dialogue reflected their cultural or societal status. He brought a tragic sense to his plays by presenting real humans in crisis—not the rich and powerful characters that Aristotle espoused, but middle or lower-class characters whose flaws were exposed. After challenging the limits of dramatic structures, such as monologue and plays dominated by mood rather than plot, O’Neill began to explore two writing tracks for a time. One was writing plays for mainstream Broadway audiences, such as Beyond the Horizon (1920) and "Anna Christie" (1921), both of which won the Pulitzer Prize. The other track was the more experimental path, and the Provincetown Players initially produced these plays. These included The Emperor Jones (1920) and The Hairy Ape (1922), both Expressionistic plays that appealed to the senses and used exaggerated dramatic devices to tell their stories and emphasize their characters’ feelings.

O’Neill would continue experimenting with dramatic forms and devices, looking primarily to establish an American version of Greek tragedy that substituted psychological states for the Greek idea of fate. O’Neill wrote more than fifty plays in his career, and most critics and scholars consider his last plays his most important; these include The Iceman Cometh (1939), A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943), and his posthumously performed Long Day’s Journey into Night (completed in 1941 but not performed until 1956). Ironically, after all his experiments, O’Neill created real American tragedy when he overtly used his own family, friends, and experiences as the sources for these last plays. After winning two more Pulitzers, in 1936 O’Neill became the first (and, still today, the only) American playwright to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Not only did he make his debut with the Provincetown Players, but he used his experience of having a supportive and ready-made company to create for himself a curriculum for experimentation that served him throughout his artistic career.

A critical aspect of the Players’ legacy became what civil rights activist and leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) James Weldon Johnson claimed was the initial and greatest force in opening up the way for the Negro on the dramatic stage.²⁵ O’Neill’s plays The Dreamy Kid and The Emperor Jones had African American lead characters, cast by the Players with African American actors, not white actors in blackface makeup (as was still the tradition). The African American actor Charles Gilpin, who performed most of his life in predominantly Black productions, came to national prominence when cast as Brutus Jones in The Emperor Jones and continued the role when the play transferred to Broadway. Gilpin won the 1921 New York Drama League award for his performance. Despite this, many African American leaders were not happy with the role of Brutus Jones and the stereotypes it portrayed; actor Paul Robeson turned down the role of Brutus initially, though he played it in revival in 1924 and later on film. However, Johnson understood the significance of an African American in a lead role on a white stage, which would become an essential element of the Players’ legacy.

Other innovations distinguished the Players. Many playwrights in the company wrote in the American Midwest style, presenting their characters with a more American dialect that sprang from syntax celebrated in the Chicago Literary Renaissance, which many in the company had been instrumental in furthering and encouraging. For a time, Floyd Dell and Cook were the editors of the influential and revered Friday Literary Review of the Chicago Evening Post, the flagship of this regional renaissance that dramatically influenced American writing. Their national reputations made them instructors of the new modern literature to their readers and the writers whose work they disseminated. Another distinguishing element of the Players was Cook’s mission for the theatre company to remain amateur so they could experiment without the influence of critics or commerce. The Players also created new approaches to stagecraft, often as the result of working with low budgets in the humble spaces in which they produced their plays. They maintained themselves as a private club versus a public entity, which provided several advantages: In theory, it eliminated the threat of censorship and offered some protection from legal scrutiny of their plays’ content. Also, using the season subscription, a new idea in America, what they charged provided them with an upfront production budget with which to plan.

Cook’s unique role in the company was vital to its success, and this study will emphasize his influence and leadership. First, he uniquely did not take an autocratic position as the sole leader in the manner of producers of the time like David Belasco, Charles Frohman, or even Maurice Browne; instead, he served more like what we today might call an artistic director. His official position was president of the organization, but from the beginning, an executive committee made the major decisions for the company, though he was always the leader of that committee. Cook’s tireless work ethic, buoyant enthusiasm, and artistic vision kept the company moving forward. What cannot be overstated is Cook’s significance in his role of developing and encouraging new playwrights. This study will argue that Cook regarded providing others with a safe place to write and experiment with their ideas as one of the major elements of his life’s work.

Part of Cook’s vision for the Players was to create what he termed a Dionysian beloved community of life-givers that lived and created together.²⁶ He held as a high priority that the company had a place to congregate before and after rehearsals and performances, a social setting to eat, drink, and stay connected to each other. From the beginning, Cook worked hard to create the best laboratory possible for any American playwright who wanted to try something new. His openness, informed by his years of working with poetry and prose writers, made him more receptive to material not seriously considered elsewhere. As we shall see, Cook did not so much have original ideas about how to form a theatre company; rather, he had the intelligence to remember what he saw work with other groups and to synthesize and implement those elements. The radical nature of the Players’ original members’ social consciousness and political activism provided a fearlessness in their collective, and their left-leaning themes were more dangerous at times than their attempts to challenge the milieu of the current commercial theatre.

By the time the Players folded in 1922, after seven years of their experiment, they had produced ninety-three new American plays by forty-seven playwrights, sixteen of those playwrights being women; this output and diversity were unprecedented. Not all of their attempts at staging America were successful; after all, they learned how to run a theatre company by trial and error. Nonetheless, as Cook continually reminded them, the Players’ goal remained clear: to give voice to new plays by American playwrights.

While they performed their first plays casually in a spirit of fun in Provincetown, the validation of these early one acts prompted their recognition that something else was possible, something alive that kept their friends wanting more. They began with parodies of life and ideas that permeated Greenwich Village and Provincetown, but in doing so, they were spoofing their lives, the America they knew. They were not creating literary masterpieces, per se, but by presenting their world, a world their audience recognized, they were removing the artifice they rejected in so much professional theatre at that time. This realness was what Cook experienced in Chicago watching the Irish Players: no stage conventions in the way of projecting with the humility of true feeling.²⁷ It was from a humble start in Provincetown in the summer of 1915 that their quest began, armed with Cook’s