Provincetown Players
This photo is not a photo of the Provincetown Players first playhouse on Lewis Wharf, but Cape Cod wharf in the West End of Provincetown. Lewis Wharf is located in the far East End of town across from the former home of Susan Glaspell. Today there is a plaque there to mark the spot.
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| Formation | 1915 |
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| Dissolved | 1923 or 1929 |
| Type | Theatre group |
| Purpose | amateur productions of new, experimental theatre |
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The Provincetown Players was an influential collective of artists, writers, intellectuals, and amateur theater enthusiasts. Under the leadership of the husband and wife team of George Cram “Jig” Cook and Susan Glaspell, the Players produced two seasons in Provincetown, Massachusetts (1915 and 1916) and six seasons in New York City between (1916-1923). The company's founding has been called "the most important innovative moment in American theatre," in part for launching the careers of Eugene O'Neill and Susan Glaspell, and ushering American theatre into the Modern era.
The Provincetown Players began in July 1915. Provincetown, Massachusetts had become a popular summer outpost for the bohemian residents of Greenwich Village. On July 22 a group of friends who were disillusioned by the commercialism of Broadway created an evening’s entertainment by staging two one-act plays. Constancy by Neith Boyce and Suppressed Desires by Susan Glaspell and George Cram Cook were performed at the home of Hutchins Hapgood and Neith Boyce.
The evening was a success and an additional performance was organized. Mary Heaton Vorse donated the use of the fish house on Lewis Wharf where a makeshift stage was assembled. The two one-acts which had been presented at the Hapgood home were restaged in August and a second bill of two new plays was presented in September: Change Your Style by George Cram Cook and Contemporaries by Wilbur Daniel Steele.
Enthusiasm for the theatrical experiment in Provincetown continued over the winter of 1915-16 and a second season was planned at Lewis Wharf. The plays were funded in part by a subscription campaign in which George Cram “Jig” Cook described the aim of the group: “to give American playwrights a chance to work out their ideas in freedom."
The second season introduced Eugene O’Neill and his play Bound East for Cardiff as well as Trifles by Susan Glaspell.
In September 1916 before leaving Massachusetts, the group met and, led by Cook and John Reed, formally organized "The Provincetown Players," voting to produce a season in New York City. Jig Cook was elected president of the newly constituted organization. The Players were founded to “establish a stage where playwrights of sincere, poetic, literary and dramatic purpose could see their plays in action and superintend their production without submitting to the commercial managers' interpretation of public taste.”
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Wikipedia