Susan Glaspell and Sophie Treadwell

About the Book

This volume offers an introduction to the lives and careers of two of the most significant American women playwrights of the modern era: Susan Glaspell and Sophie Treadwell. Glaspell and Treadwell wrote during a time of rapid changes in American society, as ideas of progressive modernism challenged and supplanted the Victorian, traditionalist world into which both women were born. This text discusses each playwright’s dramatic oeuvre and examines key stage productions of their major plays.

Susan Glaspell wrote her early plays for performance by the amateur Little Theaters of Greenwich Village and for an audience of friends who shared her rejection of ‘patterned’ Broadway plays that ‘didn't ask much of you’, as well as her convictions on politics, feminism and other contemporary developments such as psychoanalysis. These plays, written during the first years of the Provincetown Players, provided her with valuable experience in dramatic writing and production, allowing her to experiment with the trends of modernist European drama as she forged a style of her own with the express design to move her audiences to rethink their conventional attitudes.

Unlike Glaspell, however, Treadwell’s involvement with the little theatre movement was minimal since she participated with the Provincetown Players only for a short time early in their existence. Instead, Treadwell typically sought to bring reforms to the commercial Broadway theatre while similarly seeking to expand women's traditional social roles. Referred to by a theatre critic of the 1920s as Broadway’s only ‘playwright-producer-director-actress’, Treadwell created original dramatic statements about gendered behavior and sexual inequalities.

Glaspell's and Treadwell's most innovative works such as The Verge and Machinal eschew realism for a highly feminist expressionistic form; their other plays, although perhaps less obviously experimental, show how they struggled with theatrical forms to achieve a voice of their own.