The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity

The Provincetown Players was a major cultural institution in Greenwich Village from 1916 to 1922, when American Modernism was conceived and developed. This study considers the group’s vital role, and its wider significance in twentieth century American culture. Describing the varied and often contentious response to modernity among the Players, Murphy reveals the central contribution of the group of poets around Alfred Kreymborg’s Others magazine, including William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Mina Loy and Djuna Barnes, and such modernist artists as Marguerite and William Zorach, Charles Demuth and Bror Nordfeldt, to the Players’ developing modernist aesthetics. The impact of their modernist art and ideas on such central Provincetown figures as Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell, and Edna St. Vincent Millay and a second generation of artists, such as e. e. cummings and Edmund Wilson, who wrote plays for the Provincetown Playhouse, is evident in Murphy’s close analysis of over thirty plays.

• Places the Provincetown Players in the larger cultural context of modernism and modernity • Includes close analysis of more than thirty plays by the Provincetown playwrights • Considers Provincetown’s wider significance in twentieth century American culture

Preface; 1. The founding: myth and history; 2. The first plays; 3. Others and the other players; 4. Glaspell and O’Neill; 5. The legacy.