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The Culture of the Provincetown Players
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
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In the first decades of this century, American movements for social reform included a programme, somewhat belated perhaps, for cultural renewal. Disaffected from their society, lamenting a split between the nation's commercial-industrial genius, so visibly institutionalized, and its creative cultural talent, so individual and so isolated, analysts like Van Wyck Brooks undertook to search for what he entitled “ a usable past.” The phrase implied, however, that much or even most of that past, as commonly understood, was unusable: a witness to the split, or, in relation to the literary culture itself, a congeries of intellectual and artistic activity passive in the presence of social change, oblivious to its realities, merely acquiescent in relation to the institutions of a developing modern industrial society. Culture in America, Brooks and his allies felt, had no institutions. Without them the seeds of genius would not germinate, for there was no nurturing process, no method of transmission.
When “ progressive ” literary intellectuals sifted the past for its neglected, potentially alternative, tradition, they rightly did not think to look back to any earlier American dramatist for inspiration, much less to a “ usable ” dramatic tradition. Yet when the whole Progressive attempt to reformulate the social and cultural basis of American life faltered and foundered in the years of the First World War, a modest theatrical venture undertaken just as the wider movements suffered their first setbacks preserved something of Progressive social vision — focussed it, prompted it, and passed it on as a legacy to later artists and to the intellectual community, and to the public.
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References
1 Brooks, Van Wyck, “On Creating a Usable Past,” Dial, 64 (11 04 1918)Google Scholar. For Progressive historians' relation to the concept, see Pole, J. R., “The American Past: Is it Still Usable?” Journal of American Studies, 1 (04 1967), esp. pp. 64–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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13 Dell, Floyd, Homecoming (New York, 1933), pp. 254–55, 262–67Google Scholar. Glaspell, The Road to the Temple. Hapgood, in a review reprinted in his autobiography, took Dell to task for his “totally inadequate” portrait of Cook (Hapgood, pp. 315–16). Hapgood also noted that Dell might have introduced the group to the “little theatre idea” (p. 314).
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19 Programme Note to The Game from O'Neill's copy, in the Beinecke Library, Yale University.
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22 Boyce, Neith, The Two Sons, in Provincetown Plays, 3rd series (New York: Frank Shay, 1916), pp. 156, 167, 168Google Scholar. All from one scene, the major ellipsis comes between “hurt you” and “you're far above me.”
23 In the O'Neill Collection at the Bienecke Library are a number of letters to Nina Moise which clearly establish the give-and-take in their professional relationship. There is also a typescript of O'Neill's The Rope, with Moise's pencilled lines through what she took to be unnecessary dialogue and (on occasion) O'Neill's restorations.
24 Dell, p. 266.
25 “There was a new emphasis on acting, designing, direction, and particularly on organization” (Deutsch and Hanau, p. 96).