Susan Glaspell and Sophie Treadwell

Quotations

Susan Glaspell

“If the Provincetown Players had done nothing more than to give us the delicately humorous and sensitive plays of Susan Glaspell, they would have amply justified their existence” (John Corbin of the New York Times, 1919)

“[Glaspell belongs] to the purely intellectual school of American drama, if one may be permitted to label her work with a word so much feared and so often misunderstood… She follows directly in the Ibsen tradition, and may justly be described, I think, as his spiritual descendant in America. In fact, she is very much more nearly related to him than Shaw ever was or will be… She is the most important of the contemporary American dramatists, and in the opinion of almost all she vies for the first place with Eugene O'Neill.” (A.D. Peters for the Daily Telegraph, 1924)

“She gave of her best to the Playwrights Theatre, working as hard for it as Lady Gregory has worked for the Irish theatre, and obtaining from it as her reward that opportunity for expression which is denied to the younger generation of English dramatists at the present time.” (Time and Tide Anon. 1925)

“[Inheritors is a] lost gem” (V. Gluck for Backstage.com, 2005, Metropolitan Playhouse in New York)

“[Inheritors is] remarkable for its radicalism and its date” (R. Hewison for the Sunday Times, 1997 Orange Tree Theatre. Richmond, London)

[Susan Glaspell's The Verge] “cross-breeds American realism and European symbolism and, in the process, produces something both original and strange”…[the play is] “a pioneer work of feminist drama.” (Michael Billington of The Guardian, 1996)

Edith Craig on The Verge: “it contained much that was difficult to understand, [but] it was a play of such uncommon power it might be considered a masterpiece.”

Sophie Treadwell

[Machinal is] “an illuminating, measured drama such as we are not likely to see again.” (Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, 1928)

“All sorts of things that do not strictly belong to the play, things that would be excluded by other playwrights, stray into Machinal and sink out of sight again, giving us glimpses and other dimensions which the ordinary self-contained play is too ‘well-made’ ever to tolerate.” (Robert Littell, Theatre Arts, 1928)

[Machinal is] “an archeological treasure… an authentic artifact of a distant civilization and a piece of living art that seems timeless.” (Frank Rich, New York Times, 1990)