Provincetown Players

Introduction

The birthplace of the alternative-theatre movement, Provincetown Playhouse started in Provincetown, Mass., in 1915 and opened at 139 MacDougal St. in 1916 with O'Neill's Bound East for Cardiff. In 1918, the Playhouse moved to No. 133 and premiered one-acts by O'Neill, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Florence Kiper Frank. Two years later, the Playhouse saw the premiere of O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, a hit that moved to Broadway. The end of the 1921-22 seasons marked the end of the Provincetown Players, due to internal struggles.

In 1960, the theatre hosted the long-running double bill of Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape and Edward Albee's A Zoo Story. Other significant playwrights also staged their work at the Playhouse, including John Guare (Muzeeka, 1968), Sam Shepard (Red Cross, 1968) and David Mamet (Edmond, 1982). NYU purchased the building in 1984. The last long-running hit play there was Charles Busch's Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, 1985-90.

Concurrently, antirealistic expressionist and symbolic movements in theater were developing, such as Vsevolod Meyerhold's constructivism, the "theater of cruelty" of Antonin Artaud, and the "epic theater" of Bertolt Brecht. There was also a growing interest in Asian theater, which seemed attractive to many because of its relatively bare stage, symbolic stage properties, and stylized, nonrealistic acting.

Theatrical developments since World War II, especially in noncommercial theater, have brought the stage more in contact with the audience. Theater-in-the-round became popular at American universities in the 1930s, and in the 1950s and 60s many "music tents" featuring theater-in-the-round sprang up in American cities. Experimental relationships between audience and acting space have also been constructed. Such groups as the Living Theater of Julian Beck and Judith Malina produced free-form events in which audience and actors mingled, thus removing completely traditional barriers between them.

Provincetown Players in 1915-1919

Brenda Murphy takes the most conventional approach. Examining in chapter the historical influences that informed the Provincetown Players' work from 1915-1922 including the writings of William James, John Dewey, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud as well as various movements and ideologies ranging from monism, anarchism, and feminism to cubism and expressionism—Murphy proceeds to track these ideas through the biographies of the Players and several close readings of their plays both in terms of content and production process. The book is at its best in this sort of description. Murphy details how Eugene O'Neill's success with Beyond the Horizon and The Emperor Jones “changed the character” of the Provincetown Players from a concern with artistic experimentation to a more commercial bent. Murphy similarly surveys the group's contradictory avant-garde and bourgeois tendencies as manifested in all facets of their collaborative acts, from behind-the-scenes trysts to the publicly seen primitivist fetish that began in shows such as Louise Bryant's The Game 1915, directed and designed by William and Marguerite Zorach. Epistemological questions do not seem of much interest here; Murphy has written a positivist study that emphasizes the theater's role in the citation and production of social and artistic histories as opposed to focusing on the conditions of possibility that buttress such ...