<i>The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity</i> (review)

Abstract

The Provincetown Players and Culture of Modernity. Brenda Murphy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xix. + 282 pp. $85.00 (cloth). In late Fall of 1916, young physician and aspiring poet William Carlos Williams, married four years earlier and now establishing himself in a busy medical practice in Rutherford, New Jersey, traveled by train several times a week to MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village where, as an amateur actor, he was in rehearsals as one of three performers (the Husband) in poet and editor Alfred Kreymborg's short verse play, Lima Beans. The other actors in this Provincetown Players' inaugural New York production were writer Mina Loy (the Wife) and sculptor William Zorach (the Huckster). Kreymborg's work, subtitled A Scherzo Play in One Act, was scheduled to be on a bill that included Before Breakfast, by young Eugene O'Neill, and Two Sons, by Neith Boyce. Zorach designed minimalist set, which cost $2.50. In a passage in Williams's Autobiography, partially quoted by Brenda Murphy in her comprehensive new book, The Provincetown Players and Culture of Modernity, Williams recalls that experience was tough, but termed three performances (Murphy incorrectly quotes Williams as saying there were five) in December a qualified success (A 138-39). Kreymborg, according to Murphy, was more enthusiastic, remembering with pleasure a December 1 opening night with wild applause and sixteen curtain (Provincetown Players 108). Murphy calls Lima Beans an epithalamium, a kind of bridal song or parable about marital forbearance (1 09-1 0), and it is that, although helter-skelter free verse debate about whether string beans or lima beans should be served to Husband for dinner is in truth only a modest dramatic exercise. Nonetheless, Williams, hopeful about establishment of a new kind of drama, wrote that perhaps here lay (A 1 38). Murphy's book chronicles in thorough and sometimes complicated detail history and pivotal role that Provincetown Players had in shaping not only future of experimental American theatre in early part of twentieth century, but also importance of Players in helping to create what Murphy terms a self-conscious modernist (xv). Among other things, that aesthetic celebrated what Murphy calls non-representational art, including fragmentation of narrative trajectory, the abstraction of some characters into types or symbolic figures, and the theatrical equivalent of 'stream of consciousness' in fiction (xvi). Of course, playwright who would become most closely associated with Provincetown Players, Eugene O'Neill, practiced this aesthetic in many of his plays. But in very early years, many of poets and artists associated with Kreymborg's journal Others were also drawn to this unofficial movement, including Williams, Maxwell Bodenheim, Wallace Stevens, Djuna Barnes and later Edna St. Vincent Millay. And echoes of that aesthetic survived for decades in fringes of American theatre, most strikingly in Julian Beck's and Judith Malina's Living Theatre in late 1 950s and beyond. It is interesting to note that Williams's own unorthodox verse play, Many Loves, was produced by Living Theatre in New York in 1 959, and ran intermittently in repertory over next three years. As Murphy writes, origins of Provincetown Players were anything but auspicious. In July of 1915, a group of writers, artists, activists and hangers-on, drawn together while summering in Provincetown, at very tip of Cape Cod, decided to mount a single evening of theatre on veranda of home of Boyce and her journalist/anarchist friend Hutchins Hapgood. Two short plays were chosen: Constancy, by Boyce, and Suppressed Desires, co-authored by Susan Glaspell, already gaining a reputation as a writer of fiction, and professor and Utopian George (Jig) Cram Cook. …