Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Black, Cheryl
• Barlow, Judith E

Titel

Women Writers of the Provincetown Players: A Collection of Short Works

Ist Teil von

• Theatre survey, 2011-05, Vol.52 (1), p.198

Ort / Verlag

Washington: Cambridge University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2011

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Barlow provides a general introduction, placing the works within their historical and cultural context, as well as a brief introduction to each individual play that offers details on its authorship, production history, and critical reception, plus notes on the texts explaining minor distinctions among alternative published or typescript versions. Standouts include Neith Boyce's Winter's Night, which evokes Susan Glaspell's Trifles in its isolated, rural location and Eugene O'Neill's Beyond the Horizon in its depiction of a man's tortured desire for his brother's wife; Susan Glaspell's Woman's Honor, which integrates allegory and satire to expose the absurdity of masculine "chivalry" (read "chauvinism"); Alice L. Rostetter's delightfully subversive The Widow's Veil, which portrays a hopeful would-be widow's disappointment at her ailing husband's unexpected recovery; Edna St. Vincent Millay's Aria da Capo, an antiwar fable ironically and metatheatrically visualized as a Harlequinade; and Djuna Barnes's whimsical Kurzy of the Sea, set in her inimically imagined Irish universe and depicting an encounter between a dimwitted, moony lad and the free-spirited mer/barmaid who jolts him into reality. Originating in the Henry Street Settlement, where "the feminine art of maternal domesticity was merged with socialist political beliefs" (125) and funded by philanthropists Alice and Irene Lewisohn with the primary aim of bringing artistic expression to the Lower East Side, Playhouse performances included ritual cycles, folk dances, nh drama, puppetry, and the New York premiere of Angelina Weld Grimké's antilynching drama Rachel.