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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
In the first decades of this century, American movements for social reform included a programme, somewhat belated perhaps, for cultural renewal. Disaffected from their society, lamenting a split between the nation's commercial-industrial genius, so visibly institutionalized, and its creative cultural talent, so individual and so isolated, analysts like Van Wyck Brooks undertook to search for what he entitled “ a usable past.” The phrase implied, however, that much or even most of that past, as commonly understood, was unusable: a witness to the split, or, in relation to the literary culture itself, a congeries of intellectual and artistic activity passive in the presence of social change, oblivious to its realities, merely acquiescent in relation to the institutions of a developing modern industrial society. Culture in America, Brooks and his allies felt, had no institutions. Without them the seeds of genius would not germinate, for there was no nurturing process, no method of transmission.
When “ progressive ” literary intellectuals sifted the past for its neglected, potentially alternative, tradition, they rightly did not think to look back to any earlier American dramatist for inspiration, much less to a “ usable ” dramatic tradition. Yet when the whole Progressive attempt to reformulate the social and cultural basis of American life faltered and foundered in the years of the First World War, a modest theatrical venture undertaken just as the wider movements suffered their first setbacks preserved something of Progressive social vision — focussed it, prompted it, and passed it on as a legacy to later artists and to the intellectual community, and to the public.
1 Brooks, Van Wyck, “On Creating a Usable Past,” Dial, 64 (11 04 1918)Google Scholar. For Progressive historians' relation to the concept, see Pole, J. R., “The American Past: Is it Still Usable?” Journal of American Studies, 1 (04 1967), esp. pp. 64–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Hapgood, Hutchins, A Victorian in the Modern World (1939; Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1972), p. 379Google Scholar. What Hapgood called “a permanent nucleus” (p. 372) included himself and Neith Boyce, Mary Heaton Vorse, George Cram Cook and Susan Glaspell, and Wilbur and Margaret Steele.
3 Hapgood, pp. 379, 380, 385.
4 Hapgood, p. 391.
5 Dodge (Luhan), Mabel, Movers and Shakers (Intimate Memories, Vol. 3) (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1936), p. 23Google Scholar.
6 Hapgood, p. 391.
7 Dodge, p. 417.
8 Hapgood, p. 392.
9 Bourke, Paul F., “The Social Criitcs and the End of American Innocence: 1907–1921,” Journal of American Studies, 3 (07, 1969), 64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Cook, quoted in Glaspell, Susan, The Road to the Temple (New York and Toronto: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1927, 1941), pp. 252–53Google Scholar.
11 On Moreno see Greenberg, Ira A., ed., Psychodrama, Theory and Therapy (New York: Behavioral Publications, 1974, and London: Souvenir Press, Ltd., 1975)Google Scholar. Cf. n. 21.
12 Deutsch, Helen and Hanau, Stella, The Provincetown, A Story of the Theatre (New York: Farrer and Rinehart, 1931Google Scholar; rpt. New York: Russell and Russell, 1972), p. 26: “He saw the theater as ‘a laboratory of human emotions’ and ran it so that the Players might be helped and developed personally by the work they performed.”
13 Dell, Floyd, Homecoming (New York, 1933), pp. 254–55, 262–67Google Scholar. Glaspell, The Road to the Temple. Hapgood, in a review reprinted in his autobiography, took Dell to task for his “totally inadequate” portrait of Cook (Hapgood, pp. 315–16). Hapgood also noted that Dell might have introduced the group to the “little theatre idea” (p. 314).
14 Glaspell, p. 254.
15 Bogard, Travis, Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O'Neill (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 76Google Scholar.
16 Dell, pp. 263–64.
17 Glaspell, p. 254.
18 All information about the organization of the Provincetown Players comes from the “Minute Book of the Provincetown Players, Inc. From September 4, 1916 to November 8, 1923,” in the Theatre Collection of the New York Public Library at Lincoln Centre. See also Deutsch and Hanau, pp. 16–17, 33–39.
19 Programme Note to The Game from O'Neill's copy, in the Beinecke Library, Yale University.
20 Boyce, Neith and Hapgood, Hutchins, Enemies, in Provincetown Plays, 2nd series (New York: Frank Shay, 1916), pp. 98–110Google Scholar; see esp. p. 105.
21 Moreno, J. L. M.D., “Psychodramatic Treatment of Marriage Problems,” Psychodrama Monographs No. 7 (Beacon, N.Y.: Psychodramatic Institute, 1945), p. 5Google Scholar. (First published in Sociometry, 3: 1 (January 194). Moreno writes: “To the director, one solution appears to be just as desirable as another, provided only that it brings the maximum degree of equilibrium to the participants. In one case this may mean a re-integration of the husband-wife relation and in another, a break-up of this relationship, a divorce catharsis … Psychodrama is not an ‘acting’ cure, as an alternative to a ‘talking’ cure. The idea is not that the subjects act out with one another everything on their minds – off guard, in a limitless exhibitionism – as if this sort of activity, in itself, could produce results.”
22 Boyce, Neith, The Two Sons, in Provincetown Plays, 3rd series (New York: Frank Shay, 1916), pp. 156, 167, 168Google Scholar. All from one scene, the major ellipsis comes between “hurt you” and “you're far above me.”
23 In the O'Neill Collection at the Bienecke Library are a number of letters to Nina Moise which clearly establish the give-and-take in their professional relationship. There is also a typescript of O'Neill's The Rope, with Moise's pencilled lines through what she took to be unnecessary dialogue and (on occasion) O'Neill's restorations.
24 Dell, p. 266.
25 “There was a new emphasis on acting, designing, direction, and particularly on organization” (Deutsch and Hanau, p. 96).