Staging America
The Artistic Legacy of the Provincetown Players
University of Alabama Press
A comprehensive history of the Provincetown Players and their influence on modern American theatre
The Provincetown Players created a revolution in American theatre, making room for truly modern approaches to playwriting, stage production, and performance unlike anything that characterized the commercial theatre of the early twentieth century. In Staging America: The Artistic Legacy of the Provincetown Players, Jeffery Kennedy gives readers the unabridged story in a meticulously researched and comprehensive narrative that sheds new light on the history of the Provincetown Players. This study draws on many new sources that have only become available in the last three decades; this new material modifies, refutes, and enhances many aspects of previous studies.
At the center of the study is an extensive account of the career of George Cram Cook, the Players’ leader and artistic conscience, as well as one of the most significant facilitators of modernist writing in early twentieth-century American literature and theatre. It traces Cook’s mission of “cultural patriotism,” which drove him toward creating a uniquely American identity in theatre. Kennedy also focuses on the group of friends he calls the “Regulars,” perhaps the most radical collection of minds in America at the time; they encouraged Cook to launch the Players in Provincetown in the summer of 1915 and instigated the move to New York City in fall 1916.
Kennedy has paid particular attention to the many legends connected to the group (such as the “discovery” of Eugene O’Neill), and also adds to the biographical record of the Players’ forty-seven playwrights, including Susan Glaspell, Neith Boyce, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Floyd Dell, Rita Wellman, Mike Gold, Djuna Barnes, and John Reed. Kennedy also examines other fascinating artistic, literary, and historical personalities who crossed the Players’ paths, including Emma Goldman, Charles Demuth, Berenice Abbott, Sophie Treadwell, Theodore Dreiser, Claudette Colbert, and Charlie Chaplin. Kennedy highlights the revolutionary nature of those living in bohemian Greenwich Village who were at the heart of the Players and the America they were responding to in their plays.
The Provincetown Players created a revolution in American theatre, making room for truly modern approaches to playwriting, stage production, and performance unlike anything that characterized the commercial theatre of the early twentieth century. In Staging America: The Artistic Legacy of the Provincetown Players, Jeffery Kennedy gives readers the unabridged story in a meticulously researched and comprehensive narrative that sheds new light on the history of the Provincetown Players. This study draws on many new sources that have only become available in the last three decades; this new material modifies, refutes, and enhances many aspects of previous studies.
At the center of the study is an extensive account of the career of George Cram Cook, the Players’ leader and artistic conscience, as well as one of the most significant facilitators of modernist writing in early twentieth-century American literature and theatre. It traces Cook’s mission of “cultural patriotism,” which drove him toward creating a uniquely American identity in theatre. Kennedy also focuses on the group of friends he calls the “Regulars,” perhaps the most radical collection of minds in America at the time; they encouraged Cook to launch the Players in Provincetown in the summer of 1915 and instigated the move to New York City in fall 1916.
Kennedy has paid particular attention to the many legends connected to the group (such as the “discovery” of Eugene O’Neill), and also adds to the biographical record of the Players’ forty-seven playwrights, including Susan Glaspell, Neith Boyce, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Floyd Dell, Rita Wellman, Mike Gold, Djuna Barnes, and John Reed. Kennedy also examines other fascinating artistic, literary, and historical personalities who crossed the Players’ paths, including Emma Goldman, Charles Demuth, Berenice Abbott, Sophie Treadwell, Theodore Dreiser, Claudette Colbert, and Charlie Chaplin. Kennedy highlights the revolutionary nature of those living in bohemian Greenwich Village who were at the heart of the Players and the America they were responding to in their plays.
In Staging America, Jeffery Kennedy skillfully interweaves firsthand accounts, contemporary reviews, plot summaries (often of lost or unpublished plays), and critical and biographical accounts to produce the fullest account we are ever likely to have of the frequently turbulent history of this group, which, in its seven years, permanently changed the direction of the American theatre. Literature students and scholars and theatre practitioners will be mining Kennedy’s highly readable authoritative account for years to come.’
—Jackson R. Bryer, coeditor of Selected Letters of Eugene O'Neill
'Staging America: The Artistic Legacy of the Provincetown Players, Jeffery Kennedy tells the unabridged story of the innovative theatre group, from their roots in colonial American traditions to the tragic division of the O’Neill and Cook factions in 1924. In a meticulously researched and comprehensive narrative drawing on many new sources that have only become available in the last three decades, Kennedy modifies, refutes, and enhances previous studies, while shining new light at every turn on the history of the Provincetown Players.'
—The International Susan Glaspell Society
With his meticulously researched Staging America, Jeff Kennedy has established himself as the leading authority on the Provincetown Players. This book offers considerable new information and insights regarding the individuals involved with the company, influences on the company, the plays they produced, and the critical response to those plays, including Kennedy’s discovery of a number of ‘lost’ plays. I expect that Staging America is going to generate significant new scholarship on the Players, plays, and playwrights as well as other individuals and events that surface within this remarkable account of a remarkable moment in America’s social and cultural life.’
—Cheryl Black, author of The Women of Provincetown, 1915–1922
‘Staging America is not simply theater history: it is a kind of transdisciplinary bio-historiography of the many creative artists who worked together to bring the Provincetown Players—to apply a phrase that Bryer offered in conversation—‘out of the shadows.’ Availing himself of an instinct for sleuthing, years of archival work in the United States and Europe, and a harvest of digital resources not previously accessible to scholars, Kennedy creates not just a history but a panorama of the lives that created the modern American theater.’
—Eugene O'Neill Review
Jeffery Kennedy’s Staging America, a major event for theatre studies worldwide, is a magisterial chronical of George Cram Cook’s leadership of the Provincetown Players—‘a little theater group’ orchestrated by the uniquely inspiring Cook, a Midwestern dreamer who was, without question, directly responsible for the birth of modern American drama.’
—Robert M. Dowling, author of Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts
Jeffery Kennedy is associate professor of interdisciplinary arts and performance at Arizona State University. He is author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on American theater history, with a strong focus on Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell, and the Provincetown Players.
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