Well, friends and fellow Glaspellians, we finally have our teaching blog and I am officially a blogger! Please comment on your experiences teaching Glaspell’s plays and/or fiction. How do students react? How do you engage them with Glaspell’s texts? How do you contextualize her work? What versions of SG’s plays, print or online, are you using? What’s working for you in the classroom or on the stage as a teacher of Susan Glaspell?
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Hi again! You can see a film of the production of Trifles described below in its entirety on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/user/dmoiselles. It’s being used in some classrooms.
A production of Trifles in New York City on May 5, 6, and 10, 2012 is described at http://dmoiselles.com/dmoiselles.
Here’s an excerpt from the website:
d’moiselles present two powerful theatrical works revealing the life and decisions of women on a farm at the turn of the 20th century: Trifles and 1905 Wife. This pair of evocative, related plays has never been seen together before.
Trifles is a much-loved classic short play by Susan Glaspell, the second woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for drama. The companion piece, 1905 Wife, is based on a 100-year-old original manuscript by that most famous of authors, Anonymous, who sheds light on the human spirit’s triumph over housework. d’moiselles present these two different stories, beautifully told by the women who wrote the tales in the early 20th century (1905 and 1916 to be exact) in a poignant evening of theater. One is a story of winter, the other is a story of spring.
Trifles & 1905 Wife uses new theatrical elements to tie the pieces together including the addition of new characters — Hamilton Holt (a publisher and one of the founders of the NAACP) and an actress portraying Susan Glaspell herself.
I have not found such a DVD but I highly recommend an audio version of Trifles (see http://www.learnoutloud.com/Audio-Books/Literature/Drama/Trifles/42929) done by L.A. Theatre Works. I think it’s extremely well done and I heard only extremely minor adjustments to the text made — just to clarify where necessary because we are not seeing the performance. Running time is 29 minutes. It can be downloaded via iTunes. You can hear a few minutes of it on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B6hScb9Zg0.
Here’s a cast list:
Trifles
by Susan Glaspell
A L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring (in alphabetical order):
Jeanie Hackett as Mrs. Peters;
Amy Madigan as Mrs. Hale;
Sam McMurray as the Sheriff;
Steven Vinovich as Mr. Hale;
Steven Weber as the County Attorney.
Directed by Rosalind Ayres. Recorded at The Invisible Studios, Los Angeles in 2011.
No doubt the reference was to Sally Heckel’s superb film version of “A Jury of Her Peers”. If you go to the Links page of this site, under “Member Sites, Resources, Publications” you’ll see two links, one to Sally’s web site which describes the film, and another to Women Make Movies, which distributes the DVD — you or your school can purchase it from there. I’ve used it many times in class and students invariably get a lot out of it.
I’m looking for a DVD of a production of Trifles. Last year at the O’Neill Society conference, someone told me there is an excellent production now available. Can you help me locate it?