Provincetown Players

Provincetown Players American theatrical company that first introduced the plays of Eugene O'Neill . The company opened with his Bound East for Cardiff at the Wharf Theatre, Provincetown, on Cape Cod in 1916 and later worked in New York City in conjunction with the Greenwich Village Theatre under the auspices of Robert Edmond Jones , Kenneth Macgowan, and O'Neill. By producing plays that were generally considered noncommercial, the company gave unrecognized dramatists the opportunity to experiment with new ideas. The group disbanded in 1929 but through its efforts, together with those of the Washington Square Players, a truly American theater was realized. Among the well-known writers associated with the Provincetown Players were Edna St. Vincent Millay and Djuna Barnes .

Provincetown Players [and Provincetown Playhouse], group of American actors and playwrights founded in 1916 by Susan Glaspell and others, whose ardent experimentalism gave Eugene O'Neill the opportunities he needed at a vital stage in his career. Their first season, at the Wharf Theatre, Providence, RI, a converted fishing shack, included the first of his plays to be staged, the one-act Bound East for Cardiff, as well as new works by Susan Glaspell, Edna St Vincent Millay, Laurence Langner, and others. Later in the year the group moved to the Playwrights' Theatre in Greenwich Village, New York (although they continued to make the Wharf Theatre their summer headquarters until 1921), leaving it in 1918 for the Provincetown Playhouse, a converted stable a few doors away. They ceased operations in 1921, but three years later the Playhouse reopened under the management of Kenneth MacGowan. Robert Edmond Jones, and O'Neill himself, working in conjunction with the Greenwich Village Theatre, which saw the first production of O'Neill's Desire under the Elms (1924). After MacGowan's departure it functioned for a further year as the Irish Theatre, but then closed and was demolished in 1930. At the Provincetown Playhouse a number of contemporary European plays were staged; classical revivals included Congreve's Love for Love in 1925. Some of the original members of the Provincetown Players continued to work at the Playhouse, but in 1929, after an unsuccessful move to the Garrick Theatre on Broadway, the group disbanded.