Author Archives: Martha Carpentier

2023-24 ISGS Business Meeting Minutes

2023-24 International Susan Glaspell Society Business Meeting Minutes

The meeting took place online on 10 January 2024 via Zoom.

In attendance: President Emeline Jouve, VP Martha Carpentier, Membership and Finance Officer Drew Eisenhauer, EC members J. Ellen Gainor, Jeffery Kennedy, Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Honorary Member Alex Roe, members Sharon Friedman, Shoshana Milgram Knapp, Henning Bochert

President’s Report

The President thanked the executive committee for their hard work in the past year. She enumerated ISGS accomplishments such as the two translation grants awarded to Henning Bochert for Die Rose Im Sand, Stories and to Emeline Jouve as editor of Susan Glaspell Trifles/Peccadilles, The Outside/De l’autre côté, Woman’s Honor/L’Honneur d’une femme. In addition, she praised book publications since 2022, including Noelia Hernando-Real’s Rosas en la arena. Los relatos de Susan Glaspell, Marcia Noe’s Three Midwestern Playwrights: How Floyd Dell, George Cram Cook, and Susan Glaspell Transformed American Theatre, and the landmark publication of J. Ellen Gainor’s epic Cambridge University Press collection of essays, Susan Glaspell in Context, to which so many ISGS members contributed.

ISGS Twentieth Anniversary Conference

The President went on to mention the ISGS conference grant given to fund the 20th anniversary conference at Toulouse-Jean Jaures University, 7-8 December 2023, entitled the ACT/International Susan Glaspell Society Conference: Susan Glaspell Past & Present.” The conference, planned and hosted by President Emeline Jouve, was a huge success. Papers were given by J. Ellen Gainor (Cornell Univ.), Thierry Dubost (Univ. de Caen), Amanda J. Nelson (Virginia Tech Univ.), Noelia Hernando-Real (Univ. Autónoma de Madrid), Alessandra Calanchi (Univ. of Urbino Carlo Bo, Italy), Nieves Alberola Crespo (Universitat Jaume I de Castelló, Spain), Nora Grimes (Trinity College), Alex Roe (Metropolitan Playhouse, NY), and Milbre Burch (playwright and independent scholar). A video was shown of an earlier interview about the founding of the Society in 2003 with co-founders Martha C. Carpentier and Barbara Ozieblo, conducted by Noelia Hernando-Real.

In addition, the conference featured a bilingual reading of Trifles directed by Anne Cameron with the students of the UT2J Theatre Club (Soeurs Fatales), as well as a reading of Close the Book, directed by Alex Roe, which may be viewed on his YouTube channel @alexroevideo (or see link from ISGS Facebook page).

The President concluded her remarks by noting that the ISGS Facebook page, launched in January 2015, now has 328 followers, as of December 2023.

Vice-President’s and Membership & Finances Officer’s Reports

Membership & Finance Officer Drew Eisenhauer reported that in the M&T Bank Account, located in the U.S., ISGS has $4,886.84. He noted that these funds are marked as savings and generally not used for operations, which thus far have been funded out of membership dues, collected in the Paypal account. VP Martha Carpentier reported that there is currently $1,375 in the Paypal account. Funds are getting low, as well as membership. Drew reported that while the ISGS has 50 members on the books, only 25 are actual paying members. He announced that it is time to launch the biannual membership drive in 2024. He urged all members to appeal to any colleagues or participants at conferences to join. In an addendum to these minutes, and as a result of these direct appeals, within two weeks of the meeting four new members had joined, including one Lifetime member, Amanda Nelson. This has added $407.82 to our account (noting that Paypal withdraws transactional fees for each) for a total now of $1,782.

VP Martha Carpentier (webmaster) noted that the publications for 2023 had been added to the website and that she is updating the Links page. She urged members to send her links to their own or related websites.

The group then discussed the crisis in shrinking membership and possible solutions, such as expanding membership to include more performing arts people and promoting Glaspell’s short fiction and novels. Kirsten Shepherd-Barr noted that she is attending the British Society for Literature and Science (SLSA) conference in April in Birmingham at which she could promote Susan Glaspell’s work and the Society if she had some flyers to handout. It was agreed that Martha would send the old flyers to Jeff Kennedy to update, so they can be available for members for recruiting. J. Ellen Gainor offered to remind everyone who contributed to Susan Glaspell in Context to renew or join the Society. Martha mentioned the problems associated with teaching Susan Glaspell in a period of broadening generalization in academic fields. Drew suggested developing a survey to find out who is actually teaching Susan Glaspell today and what they are teaching. Maybe circulate it at ALA?

Finally, officers received an email from Angela Constantinidou, artistic director/creator of a theatre ensemble in Cyprus, who would like to produce two of Glaspell’s one-acts (Trifles and The People). She was requesting online talk back participation or a short lecture from ISGS members, as well as a plea for funds. The group discussed the possibility of creating a performance grant, like the translation grant, to help fund fledging theatre groups to stage Glaspell’s work. The group discussed the affordability of another grant and how much could be offered. It was decided to offer $250 and to lower the translation grant, now at $300, also to $250 (it has since been decided to leave both at $300). J. Ellen Gainor and Noelia Hernando-Real were asked to draft an application modeled on the translation grant application they penned previously. The addition of this grant has since been approved by the EC and accepted via email vote by the ISGS membership.

Future Plans for 2024 and 2025

Spring 2024 ALA conference in Chicago: The ISGS is planning a 3-paper panel for the 35th annual conference of the American Literature Association being held in Chicago from Thursday-Sunday, May 23-26, 2024. Jeffery Kennedy is organizing the event and chairing the panel. His CFP solicited topics ranging over any aspect of Glaspell’s works, life, and ideas, her relationship to other dramatists and thinkers, or her relevance to contemporary issues. A reading directed by Cheryl Black of her dramatization of Glaspell’s novel Ambrose and Family is being planned as well. We discussed our past relationship with the “Five Dramatists Group” at ALA, being the Eugene O’Neill Society, the Thornton Wilder Society, the Edward Albee Society, and the Arthur Miller Society. Martha added that one of the perks the group got from Alfred Bendixen was no overlap in scheduling of our panels. Should we try to resurrect the connection? To be discussed further at the conference.

Spring 2025 O’Neill conference in Athens: Once again the ISGS is planning to join hands with the Eugene O’Neill Society and participate in the 12th International Eugene O’Neill Conference, in Athens, Greece, May 27-31, 2025. The conference will include a trip to Delphi, which is being planned by the ISGS and hosted by Jeffery Kennedy. Jeff updated us on the sites to be visited.

Finally, Emeline Jouve and Noelia Hernando-Real announced plans to issue a post-Toulouse Conference CFP and to edit the papers for the journal Coup de Théâtre in 2025.

 

Susan Glaspell: teatro, vanguardia y humor (1917-1918)

In Susan Glaspell: teatro, vanguardia y humor (1917-1918) [Susan Glaspell: theatre, avant-garde and humour (1917-1918)], published by Universitat de València, three of Glaspell’s one-act classics have been rendered into living Spanish translations by poet and scholar, Nieves Alberola Crespo. The Outside, Woman´s Honor and Tickless Time range from the tragic, psychological, and profound to the light and humorous, yet they deal with Glaspell’s essential themes: the struggle for women’s social and political equality in America and the need for and success of women’s solidarity. They demonstrate Glaspell’s pioneering and often over-looked early modernist experimentation, which rivaled and preceded that of her friend Eugene O’Neill. Each play is accompanied by a detailed essay which provides not only academic criticism, but also notes, contexts, interviews with practitioners, and other invaluable background that can help readers, teachers, students or actors understand and, most importantly, play the amusing and heartbreaking work of Susan Glaspell.

https://puv.uv.es/susan-glaspell-teatro-vanguardia-y-humor-1917-1918.html

Table of contents:

Prólogo, Drew Eisenhauer

Más allá del dolor
En las afueras

 Juego de apariencias
El honor de una mujer

La quimera del tiempo
El reloj de sol

Bigliografía

ISGS 20th Anniversary Conference

 From left to right: Noelia Hernando-Real, Milbre Burch, Marcia Noe, Nora Grimes, Alex Rohe, María Nieves Alberola Crespo, Drew Eisenhauer, Alessandra Calanchi,Amanda Nelson, Emeline Jouve, J. Ellen Gainor, Thierry Dubost, Sophie Maruejouls-Koch, Anouk Bottero, Deborah Prudhon, Marianne Drugeon

The International Susan Glaspell Society was founded in 2003. To celebrate its 20th anniversary, the Society paired up with the research group ACT (Anglophone Contemporary Theatre) to organize a conference in Toulouse (France) at Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès on December 7-8, 2023. The two-day conference looked back on Glaspell’s career as a fiction writer, playwright, journalist, co-founder of the Provincetown Players, and director of the Midwest bureau for the Federal Theatre Project, as well as her great oeuvre of novels, plays, and stories, and her influence upon American fiction and drama. Welcoming those new to the field as well as those who have been involved with the ISGS since its inception, the anniversary gathered scholars, teachers, writers, stage directors, film-makers, and others to present their research on Glaspell, discuss their adaptations of her writings, or recall the activities of the Society over the years. The heterogeneity in both form and content of the presentations mirrored the plurality of Glaspell’s career, and the conference paid tribute to the Society’s endeavors over 20 years to promote Glaspell’s work and advance our understanding and knowledge of the “mother of American theatre.”

Program for the ISGS 20th anniversary conference

Papers and Presentations
Jeudi décembre 7 (Bâtiment ERASME, CRL)

14h30-17h15 Présentation d’ouvrages

Ellen Gainor (Cornell Univ.), Susan Glaspell in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2023) Discutante : E. Jouve, Univ. Toulouse – Jean Jaurès

Aurélie Delevalée (trad. Indépendante), Julie Vatain-Corfdir (Sorbonne Univ.), Sophie Maruejouls-Koch, Emeline Jouve (Univ. Toulouse Jean Jaurès), Trifles/Peccadilles, The Outside/De l’Autre côté, Woman’s Honor/L’Honneur d’une femme de Susan Glaspell (Presses Universitaires du Midi, 2023) Discutante : Nathalie Rivère de Carles, Univ. Toulouse – Jean Jaurès

Noelia Hernando-Real (Univ. Autónoma de Madrid), Rosas en la arena. Los relatos de Susan Glaspell (Publicaciones Universidad de Valencia, 2022) Discutante : N. Alberola Crespo, Univ. Jaume I

Break

Nieves Alberola Crespo (Univ. Jaume I), Susan Glaspell: teatro, vanguardia y humor (1917-1918) (Publicaciones Universidad de Valencia, 2022) Discutante : N. Hernando-Real, Univ. Autónoma de Madrid

Marcia Noe (Univ. of Tennessee), Three Midwestern Playwrights: How Floyd Dell, George Cram Cook, and Susan Glaspell Transformed American Theatre (Indiana University Press, 2022) Discutant : D. Eisenhauer, Univ. Le Havre Normandie

17h15-18h Cocktail

17h18-18h30 Lecture bilingue de Trifles, S. Glaspell par la Cie Les Sœurs Fatales

Lectriceurs : Marina Dirar, Maryam Dos Anjos, Jeremy Eckerling, Théo Lasaygues ; Mise en voix : Anne Cameron

Vendredi décembre 8 (Maison de la Recherche, salle E412)

9h-9h45 Conférence plénière Modération : E. Jouve, Univ. Toulouse – Jean Jaurès

Ellen Gainor (Cornell Univ.), Susan Glaspell, Actor

9h45-10h45 Atelier 1 Modération : M. Drugeon, Univ. Paul-Valéry

Thierry Dubost (Univ. de Caen), Trifles: Cherry Preserves to Alleviate the Bitter Taste of Loneliness

Amanda J. Nelson (Virginia Tech Univ.), A Jury of Her Peers: Reflections and Remembrances of Susan Glaspell and the Provincetown Players

Break

11h-12h Atelier 2 Modération : S. Maruejouls-Koch, Univ. Toulouse – Jean Jaurès

Noelia Hernando-Real (Univ. Autónoma de Madrid), Susan Glaspell and the Medical Humanities

Alessandra Calanchi (Univ. of Urbino Carlo Bo, Italy), Landscapes Matter: Environmental Epiphanies in Lifted Masks

13h30-14h15 Entretien Modération : J. Ellen Gainor, (Cornell Univ.)

Martha C. Carpentier (Seton Hall Univ.), Barbara Ozieblo (Univ. de Málaga) and Noelia Hernando-Real (Univ. Autónoma de Madrid) : On the International Susan Glaspell Society

14h15-15h15Atelier 3 Modération : D. Prudhon, Univ. Aix-Marseille

Nieves Alberola Crespo (Universitat Jaume I de Castelló, Spain), The Challenge of Performing Woman´s Honor in the 21st century

Nora Grimes (Trinity College), The Outside Looking In: Transnational Depictions of Women and the Natural World in Plays by Susan Glaspell, Lady Gregory, and Dorothy Macardle

Break

15h30-16h30 Atelier 4 Modération : N. Hernando-Real, Univ. Autónoma de Madrid

Alex Roe (directeur artistique du Metropolitan Playhouse, NY), Writing for «Living Beings»: Lessons Learned Producing Susan Glaspell and the Provincetown Players in a Plague Year

Milbre Burch (playwright and independent scholar), Art as Activism: Utilizing an Adaptation of Susan Glaspell’s Trifles for Community Outreach with Domestic Violence Survivors, Shelters and Service Providers

Break

16h45-17h15 Lecture de Close the Book, S. Glaspell Mise en voix : Alex Roe

Die Rose Im Sand, Stories

2023 is the year for new translations of Glaspell’s work! Announcing Die Rose Im Sand, Stories published by Dörlemann Verlag, translations of selected Glaspell short stories into German by professional translator, Henning Bochert. Only two of Glaspell’s novels have been translated into German, both before 1950, joined by “A Jury of Her Peers” a few years ago. Henning put in two years of research with support from the Berlin Senate, the German Translators Fund, and an ISGS translation grant, came to the U.S. and consulted with numerous Glaspell scholars, in order to reintroduce German readers to the enduring relevance of Glaspell’s work. He chose ten Glaspell stories from Lifted Masks (1912, 1993) and from Her America (2010, eds Bryan and Carpentier), with a focus less on the feminist aspects of Glaspell’s work, which have been in the foreground of research since the 1970s, and more on the class issues in her short prose.

Herausgegeben, aus dem Amerikanischen übersetzt und mit einem Nachwort versehen von Henning Bochert
288 Seiten. Fadenheftung. Leseband
€ [D] 26.00 / € [A] 26.80 / SFr. 35.00 (UVP)
ISBN 9783038201342

Als eBook erhältlich!
eBook ISBN 978-3-03820-900-3
€ 19.99

https://doerlemann.ch/6942

To read an interview with Henning about translating Glaspell’s work: https://henningbochert.de/en/?s=glaspell

Trifles/Peccadilles; The Outside/De l’Autre côté; Women’s Honor/L’Honneur d’une femme

2023 featured new translations of Glaspell’s work, including this translation of Trifles, The Outside, and Women’s Honor into French, published by Presses Universitaires du Midi and edited and with a foreward by ISGS President Emeline Jouve. This bilingual collection is part of series, Théâtre – Nouvelles Scènes/Anglais, devoted to the publication of plays written in
English, providing both the original texts and the translations, which will be very useful for students as well as for future productions of these plays in France. Trifles was translated as Peccadilles by Aurélie Delevallée, The Outside translated as De l’Autre côté by Sophie Maréujouls-Koch, and Woman’s Honor translated as L’Honneur d’une femme by Julie Vatain-Corfdir.

The publication has been made possible notably thanks to an ISGS translation grant.

Susan Glaspell in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

The International Susan Glaspell Society was formed in 2003 with the stated mission of “broadening the recognition of Susan Glaspell as a major American dramatist and fiction writer though production of high-quality scholarship and critical analyses of all her works, participation in national and international conferences, performances, and public readings of her plays, and the commitment to reprinting and teaching her plays, stories, and novels.” Since then many conference panels have been presented nationally and internationally, many performances and readings of Glaspell’s plays have been staged, and many ground-breaking books have been published by a core group of dedicated Susan Glaspell and Provincetown Players scholars. This new collection, Susan Glaspell in Context, released by Cambridge University Press in July 2023, represents the culmination of these 20-years of scholarly excellence and commitment.

Edited and inspired by J. Ellen Gainor, author of Susan Glaspell in Context: American Theater, Culture, and Politics 1915-48, and co-editor with Linda Ben-Zvi of The Complete Plays, this collection provides new, accessible, and informative essays by all of the leading international scholars and artists about Susan Glaspell’s life, career development, writing, and ongoing global creative impact. The collection features wide-ranging discussions of Glaspell’s fiction, plays, and non-fiction in historical and contemporary critical contexts, including sections on Glaspell’s early Midwestern background, her place as a woman in American journalism, her involvement in the Chicago Renaissance as well as Bohemian Greenwich Village, her roles in the Provincetown Players and the Little Theater Movement, and her signal contributions to Modernism both fictional and dramatic. The volume also includes the first analyses of six previously unknown Glaspell short stories, as well as interviews with contemporary stage and film artists who have produced Glaspell’s works or adapted them for audiences worldwide. Organized around key locations, influences, and phases in Glaspell’s career, as well as core methodological and pedagogical approaches to her work, the collection’s thirty-one essays place Glaspell in historical, geographical, political, cultural, and creative contexts of value to students, scholars, teachers, and artists alike.

Many heartfelt thanks to Ellen from all of us at ISGS for her leadership and indefatigable commitment to our mission.

ISBN 9781108767309

To order: Susan Glaspell in Context (cambridge.org)

 

 

New information RE: Washington Square Players and Glaspell:
“Washington Square Players Present Bill of Novelties” Christian Science Monitor 15 November 1916, p. 11. (no author listed).  The quite detailed review of this production of Trifles covers the play as part of the Second Bill of their Third Season (1916-17).
Also see the dissertation on the Washington Square Players by Eugene M. Wank:  “The Washington Square Players: Experiment Toward Professionalism” Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Oregon, 1973.
What is interesting here is the information about the company’s presentation of multiple works by Glaspell—not only Trifles, but also Suppressed Desires in 1918 (why did they change their mind about this??), and Close the Book (1918).  Trifles, moreover, was revived as part of a “Special Suffrage Week” bill sponsored by the Woman’s Suffrage Party, beginning March 12, 1917.
The Wank dissertation draws considerably on archival materials related to core members of the group, especially Edward Goodman’s (husband of Lucy Huffaker) files in the NY Public Library, but it’s not clear if the archival materials provide anything on Glaspell.
—J. Ellen Gainor

Rosas en la arena. Los relatos de Susan Glaspell (Universitat de València, 2022)

Former ISGS President Noelia Hernando-Real (right) with current President Emeline Jouve (left)

Presenting another important contribution to establishing Susan Glaspell’s reputation among readers and scholars in Spain by former ISGS President Noelia Hernando-Real.  This volume is the first lengthy introduction of Susan Glaspell and her fiction to Spanish readership. The first part of the book places Glaspell’s short fiction within its context and places the author as a remarkable contributor to U.S. short story tradition. The second part of the book, which includes the translation into Spanish of eight of her more than seventy short stories, exemplifies Glaspell’s numerous stylistic and thematic choices and how her short fiction, as her drama, challenges social, political, and artistic rules.

Tradicional y modernista, costumbrista y arriesgada, complaciente y feminista, la obra de ficción de Susan Glaspell no se ajusta a patrones sencillos. Ganadora de un Premio Pulitzer de teatro, adalid de la vanguardia teatral en Estados Unidos, escritora de novelas de reconocido prestigio, hasta hoy sus relatos siguen siendo el secreto mejor guardado de la literatura norteamericana. Este volumen presenta, por primera vez en castellano, la faceta más desconocida de la autora, su narrativa breve, con la traducción de ocho de sus más de setenta relatos, en los que se revela su variedad estilística y temática y que sitúan a Glaspell en un lugar preeminente de la imponente tradición de la narrativa breve estadounidense, a la que contribuye con arriesgadas propuestas sociales, políticas y artísticas.

https://puv.uv.es/libro/rosas-en-la-arena-los-relatos-de-susan-glaspell.html

Staging America: The Artistic Legacy of the Provincetown Players (University of Alabama Press, 2022)

Jeffery Kennedy began his career as a protégé of the great O’Neill biographers, Arthur and Barbara Gelb. Over the years he has collected the most comprehensive personal archive of Provincetown Players documents and photographs, as well traveling around the country and becoming deeply familiar with every academic and public archive. He is also the greatest raconteur of the Provincetown legends and stories, known and unknown, as well as an accomplished academic and theatre professional in his own right. Therefore his book, the first contemporary and comprehensive history of the Provincetown Players since Robert Sarlos 1982 Jig Cook and the Provincetown Players, has been long and eagerly awaited.

In Staging America: The Artistic Legacy of the Provincetown Players, Jeffery Kennedy tells the unabridged story of the innovative theatre group, from their roots in colonial American traditions to the tragic division of the O’Neill and Cook factions in 1924. In a meticulously researched and comprehensive narrative drawing on many new sources that have only become available in the last three decades, Kennedy modifies, refutes, and enhances previous studies, while shining new light at every turn on the history of the Provincetown Players.

Kennedy has placed a re-evaluation of George Cram Cook at the center of his study, tracing Cook’s mission of “cultural patriotism,” which drove him toward creating a uniquely American identity in theatre. Kennedy also provides many detailed narratives of the originating Provincetowners, adding significantly to the biographical record of the Players’ forty-seven playwrights, including Susan Glaspell, Neith Boyce, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Floyd Dell, Rita Wellman, Mike Gold, Djuna Barnes, and John Reed. Kennedy also examines other important artistic, literary, and political figures who influenced the Players, including Emma Goldman, Charles Demuth, Berenice Abbott, Sophie Treadwell, Theodore Dreiser, Claudette Colbert, and Charlie Chaplin. Finally, Kennedy re-evaluates the contribution of Eugene O’Neill to the Provincetown Players, and the company’s contribution to his development.

In the words of O’Neill’s most recent biographer, Rob Dowling: “Jeffery Kennedy’s Staging America, a major event for theatre studies worldwide, is a magisterial chronical of George Cram Cook’s leadership of the Provincetown Players—‘a little theater group’ orchestrated by the uniquely inspiring Cook, a Midwestern dreamer who was, without question, directly responsible for the birth of modern American drama.”

Jeff at the Provincetown Players Wharf site leading a tour during the 2015 centennial celebration.

Three Midwestern Playwrights: How Floyd Dell, George Cram Cook, and Susan Glaspell Transformed American Theatre (Indiana University Press, 2022)

Marcia Noe’s impressive career as a Glaspell scholar began in 1983 with her publication of the first modern biography of Susan Glaspell, Susan Glaspell: Voice from the Heartland (Western Illinois University Press). Over the intervening years Noe contributed many feminist and formalist analyses of Glaspell’s plays, often illuminating their context in Midwestern culture. This body of work is now crowned with her publication of Three Midwestern Playwrights: How Floyd Dell, George Cram Cook, and Susan Glaspell Transformed American Theatre, which tells a part of the Provincetown story that has not yet been told.

In this book Noe argues that the progressive social, political, and cultural activities in which Floyd Dell, George Cram Cook, and Susan Glaspell were involved in early twentieth-century Davenport, Iowa, informed not only the plays that they wrote but also the aesthetic and theatre practice of the Provincetown Players (1915-1922), the theatre company that contributed significantly to the foundation of modern American drama. The philosophical and political orientations of Dell, Cook, and Glaspell, fostered in their Midwestern hometown, helped to create a theatre practice marked by experimentalism, collaboration, leftist cultural critique, rebellion, liberation, and community engagement.

This book situates the origin of the Provincetown aesthetic in Davenport, Iowa, a Mississippi River town in which a large German population provided a particularly fertile cultural environment, including a Socialist local in which Dell and Cook were active. In addition to their political activities, Noe establishes that Dell’s work as reporter and editor for The Tri-City Workers Magazine, Dell’s and Cook’s leadership in the Monist Society, and Cook and Glaspell’s role in the Davenport censorship controversy were reflected in the plays that they wrote for the Provincetown Players. She discusses how all three writers were able to see that radical politics sometimes begets radical chic and shows how, consequently, several of their plays satirize the faddish elements of the progressive political, social, and cultural movements in which they were active.

Although the Provincetown Players was located on the East Coast, several of Dell’s, Cook’s, and Glaspell’s plays were set in their native Midwest. Noe’s new book tells the story of how Dell, Cook, and Glaspell effected a marriage between early twentieth-century Midwestern radicalism and East Coast avant-garde theatre practice, a marriage that resulted in a fresh and energetic contribution to American theatre.