In 1915, two Davenport, Iowa, natives, Susan Glaspell and George Cram Cook, started a theater group in Provincetown on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, which turned out to have a profound influence on American drama forever. This visionary new company, the “Provincetown Players,” had humble beginnings in the private home of some sympathetic friends: Neith Boyce and Hutchins Hapgood. Many of the Provincetown shows featured a number of short scripts presented together in a single night of performance, and this program follows that tradition.

First on the bill today is a script by Eugene O'Neill, first produced in January 1917. This script, unjustly neglected beside some of the playwrights more well known works, combines O'Neill's recurring fascination with the sea, including a setting especially reminiscent of the dangerous Atlantic crossing that had proved disastrous for the Titanic less than five years before the play was performed — with a lively debate on practical life and poetry, and a supernatural eeriness.

The second play on today’s bill is a shorter script entitled "Enemies" — it was first staged in the summer of 1916. It was written by those hospitable friends of Jig and Susan, Hutchins Hapgood and Neith Boyce, whose house was the first Provincetown Players' performance space, and who were Midwesterners just like Jig and Susan — Hutchins from Illinois and Neith from Indiana. Each of them reportedly wrote the lines for one of the two speaking parts, He and She respectively, in this collaborative, argumentative exploration of the meaning of love, marriage, and fidelity in the modern world.

CREDITS

(FOG)

Narrator: Susan Perrin-Sallak

A Poet: Merlin Nelson

A Man of Business: Marc Nelson

Third Officer of a Steamer: Philip Tunnicliff

Sound Effects: BBC, LG (freesound.org), oldestmillenial (freesound.org)

(ENEMIES)

Narrator: Mischa Hooker

He: Mike Braddy

She: Andrea Braddy

Director / Organizer / Sound Editor: Mischa Hooker

Opening and closing music: Borodin, String Quartet No. 2 in D Major, 1st and 4thmovements (performed by Musopen String Quartet)

Theme music for program: Chopin, Waltz in A-flat major, Op. 69, no. 1 (performed by Olga Gurevich)