“O’Neill in Bohemia,” June 22-26, Greenwich Village, NY.  The Susan Glaspell Society was once again pleased to be participating in the International Eugene O’Neill Conference with a full day of events on Saturday, June 25, 2011.

12:00 —SGS Business Meeting in Dean’s Conference Room, Gallatin Building, 1 Washington Place. Meeting minutes are posted.

2:00—Panel: “‘The Beloved Community’: The Provincetown Players in Context,”in Jerry H. Labowitz Theatre, 1 Washington Place @ Broadway. Chair and organizer: Sharon Friedman, the Gallatin School, New York University.

Recent scholarship on Susan Glaspell and other writers and artists of the Provincetown experiment has probed and deconstructed the by now mythical narratives of its founding and evolution to provide a more historicized and intertextual analysis of the Players and the plays. These studies situate the group at an important historical moment—the development of socialism, feminism, psychoanalysis, modernism, and the emergence of global warfare—and reveal shared stylistic and thematic concerns as well as their profound connections to other writers, cultural institutions, ideologies, discourses, and events of the period. Presentations will build on this research to explore the synergies between plays produced by the Provincetown (1916-1922) and writings produced by Village institutions, such as the Washington Square Players, the Liberal Club, The Masses, and Heterodoxy, with which they shared members, ideals, and a range of responses to events and conditions of this period.

Papers: “Oligarchy of the Artists: Jig Cook, Greenwich Village, and American Cultural Identity,” Drew Eisenhauer, Mayor of Paris Research Fellow, University of Paris, Diderot;

“A Luncheon for Suffrage: Theatrical Contributions of Heterodoxy to the Enfranchisement of the American Woman,” Noelia Hernando-Real, Universidad Complutense de Madrid;

“Staging Bohemia: Theatrical Self-Representation in Greenwich Village,” Brenda Murphy, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of English, University of Connecticut.

3:45—“Performing Bohemia”: A Concert Reading by Susan Glaspell Society members along with professional actors, adapted and assembled by Cheryl Black (University of Missouri) from Glaspell’s “The People,” the pages of the socialist journal The Masses, and sundry songs, poems, speeches, and manifestoes from the pens of the Provincetown Players and their Village cohorts, presented in the Jerry H. Labowitz Theatre. For photos of this event, follow the link to O’Neillian Win Goodbody’s gallery from “Links” page.

5:30—SGS Provincetown Punch Reception. We toasted “The Beloved Community” with their “Fish House” punch from the recipe preserved by Provincetown executive committee member Edna Kenton. The Players’ potent potable combines two kinds of brandy, rum, black tea, sugar, lemon juice, and ice, and was served to Glaspellians and O’Neillians in the gallery space adjacent to the Jerry Labowitz Theatre.

May 26-29, Boston MA.
Panel: “Dramatizing Ideas: Hybrids, Heterodoxies, and Humanisms in Greenwich Village.”
Chair: Michael Winetsky.

The Glaspell Society is pleased to present its panel as part of the Five Dramatists Societies’ series of associated panels at ALA 2011 on “Dramatizing Ideas.” Selecting for traits, cross breeding, grafting, Claire Archer, the horticultural mad scientist at the center of Glaspell’s 1921 drama The Verge, uses all of these techniques to create a new self-reproducing species of plant, calling her efforts “mad new comings together.”  In imagining Claire’s work in this play, Glaspell hit upon a metaphor for the intellectual life of Greenwich Village, where new ideas in politics, philosophy, science, spirituality, and art were bred and crossbred. Glaspell’s horticultural metaphors for ideas have been linked by recent scholars to the educational organicism of John Dewey, to the Pragmatism of William James, to the Humanism of F. C. S. Schiller, to the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, to the ontology of Henri Bergson, as well as to the evolutionary science of Lamarck, Darwin, and Haeckel. Such metaphors must be seen as the culmination of Glaspell’s own long-standing interest in the fusion of different ways of knowing. “When art weds science,” Glaspell wrote in her first novel, The Glory of the Conquered, “the resulting library is difficult to manage.” Extending these metaphors into a more general inquiry, the Susan Glaspell Society invites papers that address Greenwich Village as a site for the transformation of ideas.

 Papers: “Loving Outside the Law: Nature as Mother in Susan Glaspell and Mary Hallock Foote,” Catherine Q. Forsa, Seton Hall University;

“Jung’s Impact on the First Greenwich Village Avant-Garde,” Dr. Jay Sherry, independent scholar;

“‘What is that?’: Epistemological Crises in Glaspell’s Trifles and The Morning is Near Us,” Taryn Norman, University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Oct. 29-30, Kean University, Union NJ.

Panel: “The Significance of Susan Glaspell to American Drama and Performance.”
Chair: Linda Ben-Zvi, Professor Emeritus, Tel Aviv University.

Papers:  “Re-Visiting Bernice in the 21st Century,” Sharon Friedman, Gallatin School of New York University;

“Gender Identity in Susan Glaspell’s and Marsha Norman’s Plays”, Noelia Hernando-Real, Universidad Complutense de Madrid;

“Searching for the Voice of Minnie Wright in Trifles,” a dramatic monologue written and performed by Milbre Burch, University of Missouri.

In addition, a staged reading of Chains of Dew was presented by SGS members and professional actors, adapted and directed by Cheryl Black, University of Missouri.

Aug. 3-6, Los Angeles.
SGS/ATDS sponsored panel: “Surviving The Outside: Modernity and the Woman Artist.”
Chair: Monica Stufft, University of California at Berkeley.

This ATDS focus group panel involved Susan Glaspell Society members and featured a reading and discussion of Glaspell’s play, The Outside. A deeply symbolic one-act set at an abandoned life-saving station, the play focuses on two women who have virtually exiled themselves. In the play, male characters attempt and fail to resuscitate a drowning victim while the two women living at the life-saving station struggle with their decision to remain isolated from the rest of society. Allie Mayo “has not spoken an unnecessary word for twenty years” after the death of her husband while Mrs. Patrick has elected to be emotionally and physically distanced from others after the infidelity of her husband. Our reading (with a run-time of approximately 30 minutes) and discussion explored the significance of what Veronica Makowsky has called “two aspiring, but temporarily stymied, female modernist artists-in-life.” We considered the implications of Glaspell’s presentation of a highly gendered view of modernism or modernisms in The Outside. In particular, we addressed Glaspell’s suggestion that the woman artist cannot survive if she disconnects herself from society or from her past in order to consider the play’s implications for theatre today.

May 27-30, San Francisco.
Panel: “Intertextual Exchanges: Susan Glaspell.”
Chair: Drew Eisenhauer, University of Maryland.

Following our successful collaboration in 2009, once again the Susan Glaspell Society joined forces with the American Theatre and Drama Society, the Eugene O’Neill Society, the Arthur Miller Society, and the Thornton Wilder Society to collaborate on a series of panels and roundtables on the theme of “Intertextual Exchanges” conceived in the broadest sense. Topics included direct intertextual references to authors such as Emerson or Charlotte Perkins Gilman, as well as comparisons or interrelationships between Glaspell and her fellow Provincetowners, other playwrights of her era, or textual connections with European dramatists such as Shaw, Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekov. The panel was not limited to dramatic works: Glaspell’s novels and short fiction also offered an opportunity to explore intertextuality as she adapted themes and characters to different genres and challenged American traditions in fiction. Another avenue of exploration considered was Glaspell’s interaction with textual sources from areas of intellectual inquiry such as evolution, psychoanalysis, metaphysics, political philosophy, and contemporary events causing social and political debate during the time of her writing.

Papers:  “Intertextuality on the Frontier in Susan Glaspell’s Inheritors,” Sarah Whithers, Indiana University;

“Looking for Herland: Embodying the Search for Utopia in Susan Glaspell’s The Verge,” Frank Lasik, University of Missouri-Columbia;

“‘Trailing Clouds of Glory’: Politics, History, and Material Culture in Glaspell’s Echoes of Romantic Literature,” Michael Winetsky, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York.