Building on the Abyss: Susan Glaspell's The Verge in Production.

Abstract

Building on the Abyss: Susan Glaspell’s The Verge in Production Stephen J. Bottoms (bio) Shortly after seeing my 1993 production of Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love at the University of East Anglia, Christopher Bigsby, my PhD supervisor, handed me his edition of Susan Glaspell’s plays and told me that if I really wanted a directing challenge, I should tackle The Verge (1921). After reading it, I politely told him that I would not dare. Perhaps the play was, as Bigsby writes, “a remarkable, if imperfect work,” which attempts a “radical revisioning of all aspects of theatre,” but I was also inclined to agree with his suggestion that it often “dissolve[s] into mere pretension, a frantic posturing by characters about whom we know little” (Glaspell 19, 23, 25). Yet the play continued to haunt me: could its perceived shortcomings be overcome in production, or would they simply become more obtrusive? Three years later, I mounted The Verge at the University of Glasgow as the centerpiece to the first international conference devoted to Glaspell’s work. 1 In this article, I would like to chart some of the thinking that led to this change of heart and to the key choices made in our production process. Not only did The Verge prove to be one of the most challenging and personally rewarding plays I have ever worked on, but the experience of staging it rendered numerous insights directly relevant to current critical debates over Glaspell’s work. The playwriting of Susan Glaspell has attracted an increasing amount of long overdue critical attention in recent years. Yet scholars’ enthusiasm for her work on the page has not been matched by a corresponding enthusiasm from theatre producers willing to stage them. Consequently, most articles on Glaspell’s plays deal only with their textual potential, often in relation to contemporary literary-critical theory or the socio-historical context framing her work. (Glaspell’s playwriting career was fairly short, mostly concentrated within the period from 1915 to 1922, not coincidentally the heyday of the Provincetown Players, the company she co-founded with her husband George Cram Cook.) The continuing viability of Glaspell’s plays as texts for performance in our own era, as opposed to their importance as historical documents, has remained a moot point, especially in relation to The Verge. Almost universally regarded as her most radical and exciting writing experiment—many view its idiosyncratic linguistic extravagance as an early [End Page 127] example of l’ecriture feminine—the play has nevertheless been considered deeply problematic as a blueprint for production, if not totally unstageable. Our Glasgow production attempted to disprove that latter assumption, although admittedly it was not without flaws of its own. This was a student-acted production with a tiny design budget in a severely limited black box studio, and several parts of the show never quite gelled. The conference participants were divided over its effectiveness, some remaining suspicious of our more stylized production choices, while others applauded them as a logical extrapolation of Glaspell’s writing.2 Nonconference audience members were similarly divided, many perceiving the play as exactly what its detractors claim: an overly long, seriously prolix piece of confused feminist invective. Yet enough people left commenting on the “inspiring” and “emotionally draining” quality of the experience to suggest we had tapped at least something of the play’s potential. Given The Verge’s boundary-breaking subject matter, perhaps any production of it would prove to be contentious. The play focuses on Claire Archer, a visionary who has abandoned all the conventional niceties of her upper middle class existence in the pursuit of what she calls “otherness.” In her bizarre greenhouse, she crossbreeds plants into strange new forms that break beyond what was previously conceived to be “natural,” her obsessive devotion to this task appearing to be an expression of a more personal quest to break beyond the roles available to her as a “natural” woman (wife, mother, charitable worker, flower arranger). On the page, Claire’s restless urge for personal transcendence is most apparent in her words; periodically exploding into vivid monologues that defy simple comprehension, she stretches the limits of the English language in...