Gaspell's Contributions to Theatre are Not Merely "Trifles"
by Brandi Andrade, Ph.D.
Those of you whose first experience of Susan Glaspell's TRIFLES was Echo Theatre's production during 2000's Festival of Independent Theatres may be surprised to learn that it was first produced in 1917. The story is still engaging, the suspense still captivating, the ideas still resonant. While it’s always a pleasure to encounter a play with these qualities, whether new or old, TRIFLES is also as historically significant as it is enjoyable to watch.
Susan Glaspell belongs to a small category of women in her time who were writing plays focused on women. She was co-founder of, playwright for, and performer (both back- and onstage) with a group of theatre artists called the Provincetown Players. This group of radical-thinkers (socialists, feminists, and the like) not only brought some of the first social criticism to the American stage but, in the process, created some of the first uniquely American realist drama.
TRIFLES was one of the first plays produced by the Players. Its themes -- the law’s inadequacy for addressing the lives of women, the need for women to support one another, the loss (for both sexes) resulting from the “separate spheres” social doctrine -- were especially resonant in 1917, as the second (and more radical) push for women’s suffrage was just getting underway.
The work of the Provincetown Players and their two favorite playwrights, Susan Glaspell and Eugene O’Neill, helped create the independent theatre movement in America and establish the legitimacy of experimental theatre. In this way, Glaspell is a kind of dramaturgical “foremother” to Echo!
[July 2000]