The Verge was produced and directed by Cheryl Black, Associate Professor, Department of Theatre, University of Missouri-Columbia, and performed by MU students at the Corner Playhouse, April 2-5, 2009.
Panel: “Staging Modern Geographies: Susan Glaspell and the Dramatic Space.”
Chair: Noelia Hernando-Real, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.
Papers: “Susan Glaspell’s Theatre and the ‘Discourse of Home,'” Sharon Friedman, Gallatin School, NYU;
“On the Margins of Utopia: Heterotopian Houses in Susan Glaspell’s Trifles and The Outside,” Emeline Jouve, Toulouse University;
“Crumbling Geographies: The House of Usher in Susan Glaspell’s Theatre,” Noelia Hernando-Real.
Workshop: “Broader Contexts for Teaching Susan Glaspell.”
Chair: Barbara Ozieblo, University of Málaga.
Participants:
Nieves Alberola, Universidad de Jaume I, Castellón; Judith E. Barlow, University at Albany, SUNY; Martha C. Carpentier, Seton Hall University; Sherry Engle, CUNY; Drew Eisenhauer, University of Maryland; Sharon Friedman, Gallatin School, New York University; Noelia Hernando-Real, La Salle Collage-Universidad Autónoma de Madrid; Michael Winetsky, Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Presented by the Richard Stockton College Interdisciplinary Center for Hellenic Studies; Executive Director: Tom Papademetriou, Conference Director, David Roessel.
On one side of the Philadelphia Art Museum stands a replica of the famous statue of “The Charioteer” in the archaeological museum of Delphi. The statue is more than simply a copy of a famous work of art; it also represents a cultural matrix linked to the ancient shrine of Apollo at Delphi, a matrix that centers on what it means to be human and happy as encapsulated in the phrases “know yourself” and “nothing in excess.” Often in current discourse “Greek” or “Hellenic” is taken as a single ideological construct, but “Greece” as an idea is polymorphous and multicultural, and Delphi occupies a key place within that ideological construct. By understanding what it meant, and continues to mean, in the modern age, we take a step toward knowing ourselves. And within that step, of course, lies the meaning of Apollo’s sanctuary.
Participants in this symposium examined the work of American and European artists, writers, and scholars who stood at the ancient site and, like the founders of the famed Provincetown Players, George Cram Cook and Susan Glaspell, inhabited Delphi in body and mind. Participants analyzed how the “spirit” of Delphi inspired individuals, and how they in turn infused that spirit into American literature and culture, presenting, in addition to Glaspell and Cook, papers on Isadora Duncan, Eva Palmer Sikelianos and her role in the Delphic Festivals of the 1920s, H. D., Henry Miller, and James Merrill.
Susan Glaspell Society Panels and Papers:
June 24, George Cram Cook Session, Chair Christa Frantantoro:
“Jig Cook’s Road to the Temple,” Linda Ben-Zvi, Tel Aviv University.
June 25, Susan Glaspell Session, Chair Marina Angel:
“Letters Home: Susan Glaspell’s Experience of Delphi,” Barbara Ozieblo, University of Málaga;
“Susan Glaspell’s Greece: the people, the place and the past,” Martha C. Carpentier, Seton Hall University;
“Susan Glaspell’s Female Charioteers: the spirit of Delphi and Aristotle’s Poetics in Inheritors, The Verge, and The Comic Artist,” Noelia Hernando-Real, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid;
“The Noble Peasant: Humanism and Primitivism in Glaspell’s Life and Work,” Michael Winetsky, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
June 26, L’Envoi to George Cram Cook Session, Chair David Roessel:
“The Influence of George Cram Cook’s Delphic Spirit on Eugene O’Neill,” Michael Solomonson; Northland Pioneer College.
University of Athens students presented a spirited reading of Suppressed Desires on the evening of the 26th.
For more information:
Delphi Symposium Program
Susan Glaspell Paper Abstracts
The Theatre of Dionysus and Temple of Apollo at Delphi, which Glaspell celebrated in Fugitive's Return and The Road to the Temple.
Linda Ben-Zvi and guide take us to Susan and Jig's camp in Kalania (SGS members left to right, Michael Winetsky, Martha Carpentier, Yoko Chase, Noelia Hernando-Real, and Linda Ben-Zvi). "The forest opens and gives us Kalania--the mountain park, that secret beauty, loveliness that is like a heart, a heart guarded by mountains of spruce" (The Road to the Temple 261).
“O’Neill’s Global Legacy,” June 11-15, Tao House, Danville CA.
Panel: “Performing Race, Gender, and Nation: Susan Glaspell, Eugene O’Neill
and the Modern Drama Classroom.”
Chair: Monica Stufft, University of California Berkeley.
This panel explored the global legacies of the two playwrights and considered the ways we locally stage these legacies in a broadly defined modern drama classroom that includes scholarship and productions. Papers investigated intertextual links around issues of race, gender and/or nation, and considered questions such as how do the plays of Glaspell and O’Neill construct identities both nationally and internationally? How might issues of race, gender and/or nation circulate when we frame these playwrights as American in relation to the European modern theatrical tradition and, in our scholarship and productions, as part of the modern drama canon?
Papers: “Divided by a Common Language: O’Neill, Glaspell and the European Modern Drama Tradition,” Francesca Coppa;
“Performing Liberalism: Empathy and Protest in an Age of Nationalist Fervor,” Michael Winetsky, City University of New York;
“American Bodies: Intersections of Race and Gender in Emperor Jones and Inheritors,” Monica Stufft, University of California Berkeley.
The Susan Glaspell Society is pleased to make available an abridged version of Susan Glaspell’s play, Chains of Dew, adapted and with a prologue by Cheryl Black, Associate Professor & Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Theatre, University of Missouri-Columbia.
This version, free to all, will enable theatre groups and universities to stage this witty and provocative play, the last ever produced by the original Provincetown Players in 1922. The only restriction is the request that Prof. Black and The Susan Glaspell Society be acknowledged in any program or print advertising connected with the production, by including the following note: “The script for this performance was adapted from the original by Cheryl Black, with the permission of Valentina Cook, and in cooperation with the Susan Glaspell Society.”
The Susan Glaspell Society is pleased to make available an abridged version of Susan Glaspell’s play, Inheritors, edited by Iris Smith Fischer, University of Kansas. This version, free to all, will enable more theatre groups and universities to stage this relevant and moving play. The only restriction is the request that Prof. Fischer and The Susan Glaspell Society be acknowledged in any program or print advertising connected with the production by including the following statement: “The script for this performance was adapted from the original by Iris Smith Fischer, with the permission of Valentina Cook, and in cooperation with The Susan Glaspell Society.”
Inheritors – Fischer’s Introduction
Inheritors Act I
Inheritors Act II Scene I
Inheritors Act II Scene II
Inheritors Act III
Edited by Barbara Ozieblo and Jerry Dickey for the Routledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatists Series, Susan Glaspell and Sophie Treadwell is an invaluable introduction to two of the most important American women dramatists of the twentieth century.
ISBN 978-0-415-40484-6
To order: http://www.routledge.com/9780415404846
J. Ellen Gainor has co-edited the new Norton Anthology of Drama with Stanton B.Garner Jr. and Martin Puchner.
Two vol. set: ISBN 978-0-393-97470-6
Shorter edition: ISBN 978-0-393-93412-0
To order:
http://books.wwnorton.com/books/978-0-393-93412-0/
Ruth Everett as Nora, Charles Daish as Leon in Orange Tree production directed by Kate Saxon, March-April 2008. Other performers included Helen Ryan as Mother, David Annan as Seymore, Katie McGuinness as Dotty, and Gwynfor Jones as James O'Brien. Photo courtesy of Robert Day.
The Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond U.K., revived Glaspell’s Chains of Dew, directed by Kate Saxon, on 12 March – 5 April 2008, to very favorable reviews:
Michael Billington at the Guardian wrote, “As part of its female playwrights’ season, the Orange Tree has unearthed this astonishing play by Susan Glaspell: a contemporary of Eugene O’Neill. Writing in 1922, she tackles not only birth control, but the timeless battle between progressive east-coast liberalism and entrenched midwest conservatism.”
Sam Marlowe at the London Times wrote, “That Glaspell ends the play not with neat resolution, but with a sour twist, shows a bracing realism: she was clearly under no illusions about how far the struggle for equality still had to go.”
“Given the easy chuckles and enthusiastic applause that greeted Susan Glaspell’s provocative comedy on press night, it seems astonishing that this is the first and only revival of the play since its premiere at the Provincetown Playhouse on Cape Cod in 1922.” John Thaxter, British Theatre Guide.
” . . . Few male writers of the period or since could have Glaspell’s awareness of the games men’s minds and vanities play, and of the ways women are forced into the role of supporting their self-delusions. And a major strength of the play is that Glaspell’s righteous anger only complements, and doesn’t get in the way of the predominantly light comic tone.” Gerald Berkowitz, TheatreguideLondon.
May 24-27, Boston MA.
Panel: “The Grotesque in the Work of Susan Glaspell, Djuna Barnes, Zora Neal Hurston
and Their Modernist Contemporaries.”
Chair: Mary E. Papke, University of Tennessee.
As Philip Thomson argues in his The Grotesque, the grotesque depends for its effect on disharmony and ambiguity, an interruption of the normal by an eruption of the freakish, the ominous, and the estranged. He goes on to argue that it most often appears in art and literature during periods of great strife, radical change, or profound disorientation, periods, that is, like that of the modernists in which artists responded in their works to both national and international crises and possibilities. The American literary grotesque is exemplified in the work of Edgar Allan Poe and Flannery O’Connor, but it is not totally surprising that it also figures in important ways in the work of early modernists who were determined to break with the sentimental and romantic movements that preceded their emergence and to make of American literature something shockingly new. The grotesque in art is typically defined as work in which the natural and the monstrous are intertwined in bizarre or fanciful combinations; somewhat strangely, then, the grotesque character elicits from the reader both disgust and empathy in that such a character repulses us even as it whets our desire to understand its otherness. In Glaspell’s work, we see the grotesque emerge both in her plays (such as The Verge) and in her novels (Fugitive’s Return, for example), two examples that indicate well the different uses to which the grotesque can be put. Other modernists employ the grotesque in similarly innovative ways.
Papers: “‘Getting at things in terms of the preposterous’: The Satiric Grotesque in Susan Glaspell’s World War I-Era Stories,” Martha C. Carpentier, Seton Hall University;
“Macabre Revelations: The Grotesque and Eugenics in Glaspell and MacKaye,” Kimberly A. Miller, Fort Hays State University;
“The Grotesque Tradition and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Mary McAleer Balkun, Seton Hall University.