On the Edge: The Plays of Susan Glaspell

Abstract

Until recently, Susan Glaspell has been little more than "a footnote in the history of drama," remembered chiefly for her association with Eugene O'Neill and the Provincetown Players; her contemporary reputation as one of the two most accomplished playwrights of twentieth-century America may come as a legitimate surprise even to serious students of dramatic history. Her plays have rarely been performed by professional companies and, apart from the often-anthologized Trifles, have been unavailable in print; such marginalization of Glaspell's work is the most obvious way in which her drama can be said to be "on the edge." Its own preoccupation with the limits of experience is another.