Next month, Northeast Stage will put the work of American theater pioneer Susan Glaspell — and the memorable women she imagined — in the spotlight, with a limited production of three plays exploring marriage, power, misunderstanding and the inner lives of women.
“The Unseen Woman: Works by Susan Glaspell” will run April 17-19 and April 24-26 at the Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Greenport. The production will feature the Glaspell one-acts “Trifles,” “Suppressed Desires” and “The Outside,” directed by Rebecca Adams-Korn, Georgia Ciaputa and Mary Caulfield, respectively.
The three plays Northeast Stage selected differ sharply in tone, moving from mystery to satire to drama, but all revolve around the pressures placed on women’s lives.
The non-profit theater‘s show is also a broader tribute to women on the North Fork, according to organizers. Opening night will include a reception featuring women-owned businesses including One Woman Wines & Vineyard, First and South, owned by Sarah Phillips, and Special Effects Salon & Spa. Northeast Stage also plans to offer one performance as pay-what-you-can and donate a portion of profits to the National Women’s Law Center.
American theater pioneer
Glaspell is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and co-founder of the Provincetown Players, the first modern American theater company, famous for launching the career of playwright Eugene O’Neill. In Robert M. Dowling’s recent biography “Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts,” the author describes Glaspell and O’Neill as the landmark company’s “two greatest dramatic discoveries.”
Mark Heidemann, co-chair of the Northeast Stage board, sees a connection.
“Both seaside villages: Provincetown and Greenport. Two theater companies co-founded by women [Amie Sponza co-founded Northeast Stage]. So I thought, ‘Glaspell being a feminist, let’s make this a celebration of women on the North Fork, because women run so many businesses here.’”
A rare spring bloom of Susan Glaspell one-acts was born.
‘Truth’
Ciaputa, a Northeast Stage board member who is directing “Suppressed Desires,” called the project “a tribute to the invisible force of women.”
The play, first performed in 1915, is a satirical comedy about a wife’s obsession with Freudian psychoanalysis and dream interpretation. Ciaputa said it pokes fun at the early 20th century fascination with psychology, but still feels relevant as a satire about fixation and excess.
“I’d like to explore in my rehearsal process a lot of acting exercises to bring truth to these characters, because comedy only works if it’s truthful,” she said. “So I’m hoping to … bring realism to what we’re doing, even though a lot of it is absurd.
“Because all great comedy has conflict, and then it turns into wants, turns into needs, turns into chaos, obsession — which turns into chaos — and then finally, there’s a resolution at the end.
“So that’ll happen in the 25 minutes of my play,” she said, and then laughed at the thought.
‘Women’s inner lives’
Adams-Korn, who is directing “Trifles” (one of Glaspell’s seminal works, composed in 10 days in 1916), described that play as the darkest of the three.
It follows two women in a farmhouse kitchen as their male counterparts investigate upstairs after the murder of a woman’s husband. Adams-Korn said the play’s original working title was “A Jury of Her Peers,” an ironic nod to the fact that at that time women on trial were judged by juries of men. Glaspell adapted it into a short story of the same name in 1917.
“They are trying to piece things together to see if or why their neighbor friend has committed this murder,” Adams-Korn said, but the men in the play trivialize the women’s observations.
Glaspell was inspired to write “Trifles” after covering the 1901 Iowa murder trial of Margaret Hossack, as a young reporter for the Des Moines Daily News.
Adams-Korn said the play still speaks clearly to modern audiences.
“I think, unfortunately, often opposite sexes can misunderstand each other for multiple reasons,” she said. “But women’s inner lives are still as deep and rich as ever, and I think that there are still more opportunities today for women to continue to bring that out.”
She said “Trifles” shows that women are “often underestimated. I think we’ve done a lot of work in the last century plus, but there is still so much more to go.”
‘Stifled’
Caulfield, who is directing “The Outside,” said the three plays create an arc that explores “the complexities of the home” and the way domestic life can serve as both “your comfort and your curse.” She said Glaspell understood home in American life as a “metaphor for women’s inner life.”
Caulfield contends that the neglected house in “Trifles” isn’t evidence of the woman of the house’s failures. Instead, she said, the deeper emotional reality is that “the home was bad to her,” and that the condition of the house reflects “her spirit being stifled.”
“I think [Glaspell] really understood the critical framework that the world has forever and will forever see women through: the home.” She said American women’s traditional identities as homemakers are “encoded within the leftovers of the Victorian ideal of the ‘angel of the household,’ and the idea that the moral center of the home is equal to the moral righteousness of the woman.”
Glaspell’s genius, Caulfield said, was that she “saw the possibility of … subverting those things that we take for granted, and using that as power.”
The production also stands out because full evenings built around one-act plays by a long-established playwright are relatively unusual on the East End. Heidemann and Adams-Korn said one-act festivals are usually built around new, local work.
Caulfield said the limited performance history for some Glaspell plays makes the project both liberating and daunting.
“I hope to embody timelessness, if it’s possible.”