Little Theatres and AmateurismWednesday, February 12th

Hull House, Chicago• Hull House: a settlement

house (community centre for new immigrants, run by live-in volunteers) founded by Jane Addams in Chicago in 1889. The theatre at Hull House evolved from a gathering place for immigrant artists to a space where both popular and “high brow” theatre were performed for working-class audiences.

The Abbey Theatre, Dublin

Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory and William Butler Yeats, Abbey Theater founders

From an early Abbey production of John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea, written in 1906

The Abbey Theatre: founded in 1904 in a disused mechanics’ school as home to Gregory and Yeats’s Irish Literary Theatre. Refers to itself as “the first state-subsidized theatre in the English-speaking world.” Has premiered the major works of Synge, O’Casey, Brendan Behan, Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, and Marina Carr during its 110-year existence.

The Pageant Revival

The Armory Show, March 1913

The Armory Show, March 1913

The Provincetown PlayersThe original Provincetown Playhouse in Provincetown, Massachusetts (the company moved to Greenwich Village, in New York City, in 1916)

The Provincetown PlayersClockwise from left: George Cram “Jig” Cook; Cook and Eugene O’Neill helping with the scenery for Bound East for Cardiff (1916); Edna St. Vincent Millay; Susan Glaspell; John Reed

The Provincetown Players“It is the primary objective of the Provincetown Players to encourage the writing of American plays of real artistic, literary and dramatic—as opposed to Broadway—merit…The author shall produce the play without hindrance, according to his own ideas.”

—Constitution of the Provincetown Players, 1916

“All these plays were written, staged, and acted by members of the group; and the most expensive production cost less than thirteen dollars… The Players’ theatre remains, as it began, a stage of free dramatic experiment in the true amateur spirit.”

—George Cram Cook, advertising circular for the company, 1916

The Provincetown Players

Left: Millay’s Aria da Capo (1918)Right: O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, with Charles Gilpin (1920), and The Hairy Ape (1921)

Greenwich Villagein the 1910s

Meanwhile, Farther Uptown…Far Right: The Harlem YMCA, home of the Acme Players

Left: Program for the Krigwa Players, 1926

Bottom Center: the famous “voodoo Macbeth” staged by the Lafayette Players, directed by a young Orson Welles; Bottom Right: the Lincoln Theatre, home of several early Harlem companies

Right: Charles S. Gilpin in costume as Brutus Jones

Little Theatres in Canada

Glaspell’s TriflesPoints to consider:

1) What is the role of environment in this play?

2) Where is the narrative “center” of this play—in the events that happened before it begins or in the

events that we actually see in front of us?

3) What is the purpose or significance of the play’s metatheatricality (i.e. its tendency to represent real life as

already innately theatrical)?

4) Trifles is widely regarded as one of the first American feminist dramas—but what exactly is feminist about it?

Looking Ahead: The US Federal Theatre Project (1935-1939)