The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity

A study of the most influential theatre group of the twentieth century, the Provincetown Players.

The Provincetown Players, an experimental theatre group that flourished in Greenwich Village from 1916 to 1922, included such playwrights as Eugene O'Neill, Susan Glaspell, and Edna St Vincent Millay. Murphy considers the group's vital role in the development of modernism, and its wider significance in twentieth century American culture.The Provincetown Players was a major cultural institution in Greenwich Village from 1916 to 1922, when American Modernism was conceived and developed. This study considers the group's vital role, and its wider significance in twentieth-century American culture. Describing the varied and often contentious response to modernity among the Players, Murphy reveals the central contribution of the group of poets around Alfred Kreymborg's Others magazine, including William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Mina Loy and Djuna Barnes, and such modernist artists as Marguerite and William Zorach, Charles Demuth and Bror Nordfeldt, to the Players' developing modernist aesthetics. The impact of their modernist art and ideas on such central Provincetown figures as Eugene O'Neill, Susan Glaspell, and Edna St Vincent Millay and a second generation of artists, such as e. e. cummings and Edmund Wilson, who wrote plays for the Provincetown Playhouse, is evident in Murphy's close analysis of over thirty plays.