Discover Provincetown Celebrates Women's Week with a Special Tour

Playwright Susan Glaspell's work has helped
women break out of limiting, traditional roles.

This week, Discover Provincetown celebrates Women’s Week with a little extra time on every tour devoted to the remarkable, pioneering women of our town. Women here have been chipping away at the proverbial “glass ceiling” since at least the 1700s.

One of these was Susan Glaspell, a "founder" of the original Provincetown Players, the little theater company that changed the face of theater in the United States beginning in the summer of 1915. In fact, Provincetown can rightfully be called the birthplace of modern American Drama.

Glaspell and several other women and men were discouraged with the commercial nature of American theater at that time, and shook things up a bit when they began writing their own plays.  They also broke new ground when they performed Eugene O'Neill's sea play Bound East for Cardiff the following summer, when O'Neill arrived here to seek them out, carrying a little trunk of plays he'd written.  His career as a playwright was launched when he met up with that little ragtag theater troupe just before they went to New York in September of 1916, to establish the Provincetown Players as a permanent, year-round company.

In her 2002 book The Women of Provincetown, 1915-1922, Cheryl Black remarks that the Provincetown Players have been acknowledged as “one of the first theatre companies in America in which women achieved prominence in every area of operation.” Through their work with this fledgling theater company, Susan Glaspell, Mary Heaton Vorse, Ida Rauh, Neith Boyce, Marguerite Zorach, Louise Bryant, Djuna Barnes, Edna St. Vincent Millay and others pushed against the barriers that held women strictly in traditional roles.

Glaspell debuted her own groundbreaking work that summer of 1916 in her one act play Trifles, which is still used in theater courses and continues to be held up as a model for young playwrights. Her work is revered worldwide. In fact, the 100^th anniversary of Trifles was celebrated last week by the International Susan Glaspell Society, with a reading of the play and a panel discussion at NYC’s Metropolitan Playhouse.

Join me on my tour and learn more about the amazing feats of various Provincetown women who have shaped our history, and that of the greater world around us.

Happy Women’s Week!