Provincetown Players, The

Provincetown Players, The, little‐theater group of authors, actors, and artists, first drawn together at Provincetown, Mass. (1915). Their association continued, with changes of place and personnel, until c. 1929. The first plays were produced under the direction of George Cram Cook in a remodeled fishing smack, The Wharf Theatre. One‐act plays continued to be produced at Greenwich Village, in The Playwright's Theatre, and later the expanded organization presented three‐act plays in this and the Greenwich Village Theatre. By 1925 the Provincetown productions had included 93 new plays by 47 playwrights, greatly influencing the standards of American drama. Among these plays were all the works of Eugene O'Neill up to that date, Edna St. Vincent Millay's The Princess Marries the Page and Aria da Capo, Susan Glaspell's The Inheritors, Sherwood Anderson's The Triumph of the Egg, and others by prominent authors. Later plays included Paul Green's In Abraham's Bosom and E.E. Cummings's him (1928). R.E. Jones, Lewis Beach, Floyd Dell, Edna Ferber, and Kenneth Macgowan were other authors and artists associated with the group, which published The Provincetown Plays (6 vols., 1916–18).