Provincetown Players. Founded in 1915 in Provincetown, Massachusetts, by a group of theatre lovers headed by Susan Glaspell and her husband, George Cram Cook, it gave its first performances that same summer in a small theatre on a wharf in the city. Robert Edmond Jones designed the sets. The second summer the program was much enlarged and included two plays, Bound East for Cardiff and Thirst by Eugene O'Neill. The season was so successful that the group took over a small playhouse in New York's Greenwich Village (later moving to another one) and began the first of over a decade of seasons that would continue until 1929, with a major reorganization after 1921 that left Jones, O'Neill, and Kenneth MacGowan in charge. At first the company offered largely one‐act plays but later included full‐length works. Among the major or interesting works offered by the group were John Reed's Freedom (1916); O'Neill's Before Breakfast (1916), Fog (1917), The Sniper (1917), The Long Voyage Home (1917), and Ile (1917); Maxwell Bodenheim's Knot Holes (1917), written wit William Saphir, and The Gentle Furniture Shop (1917); O'Neill's The Rope (1918), Where the Cross Is Made (1918), The Moon of the Caribbees (1918), and The Dreamy Kid (1919); Edna St. Vincent Millay's Aria da Capo (1919); Edna Ferber's The Eldest (1920); O'Neill's Exorcism (1920), The Emperor Jones (1920), and Diff'rent (1920); Glaspell's Inheritors (1921); O'Neill's The Hairy Ape (1922); a revival of Fashion (1924); O'Neill's The Ancient Mariner (1924) and All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924); Edmund Wilson's The Crime in the Whistler Room (1924); O'Neill's Desire under the Elms (1924); and Paul Green's In Abraham's Bosom (1926). During its heyday the troupe ran the Greenwich Village Theatre as well as the PROVINCETOWN PLAYHOUSE. In their excellent history of the company, The Provincetown: A Story of a Theatre (1931), Helen Deutsch and Stella Hanau concluded simply, “The Provincetown was more a laboratory than a theater. . . . To it belonged the task of developing playwrights, of taking risks with unknown actors and designers.”

PROVINCETOWN PLAYERS

PROVINCETOWN PLAYERS was an avant-garde theater group of authors, artists, and actors that produced Eugene O'Neill's Bound East for Cardiff in 1916 in a renovated fishing shack, the Wharf Theater, in Provincetown, Massachusetts. First under the direction of George Cram Cook, the group went on to become well known for producing or otherwise supporting the experimental work of such authors as Djuna Barnes, Susan Glaspell, e. e. cummings, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, in addition to O'Neill. Dramatic productions and other endeavors were managed by the artists themselves or others more interested in advancing literary expression than in reaping commercial profits. Eugene O'Neill went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for four of his plays, and in 1936, he became the first playwright to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. O'Neill's success brought attention and lasting credibility to, and nostalgia for, the Players, who had moved their work to Greenwich Village in New York City before they disbanded in 1929.

Works produced by the Provincetown Players, either in Provincetown or in Greenwich Village, include Millay's The Princess Marries the Page and Aria da Capo; Glaspell's Inheritors; Sherwood Anderson's The Triumph of the Egg; and e. e. cummings's him.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cook, George Cram, and Frank Shay, eds. The Provincetown Plays. Cincinnati, Ohio: Stewart Kidd, 1921.

Deutsch, Helen, and Stella Hanau. The Provincetown: A Story of the Theatre. New York: Russell and Russell, 1931.

Egan, Leona Rust. Provincetown As a Stage: Provincetown, The Provincetown Players, and the Discovery of Eugene O'Neill. Orleans, Mass.: Parnassus Imprints, 1994.

Sarlós, Robert Karóly. Jig Cook and the Provincetown Players: Theatre in Ferment. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982.

Connie AnnKirk

See alsoTheater .

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.

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 .