Susan Glaspell
Reporter, novelist, theatre maker
Susan Glaspell (1876–1948) was born in Davenport, Iowa. She graduated from Drake University in 1899 and worked for the Des Moines Daily News before returning to Davenport to concentrate on writing. Magazine stories and novels preceded the theatrical work for which she is now especially known. The Glory of the Conquered appeared in 1909, followed by The Visioning in 1911.
With her husband George Cram Cook, Glaspell helped establish the Provincetown Players. She contributed organizational work as well as plays and helped secure performances of Eugene O’Neill’s early drama. Her own career continued across fiction and theatre; Alison’s House received the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1931.
Experiment within a working theatre
The Provincetown setting matters because these plays were written for performance among people developing an alternative to established theatrical conventions. Glaspell’s dramatic writing ranges from recognizably everyday exchanges to experiments in the language and space through which a character’s struggle becomes visible.
This volume gathers Trifles, The Outside, The Verge, and Inheritors. It therefore offers more than an isolated example of her short drama. Their different lengths and arrangements allow the reader to compare how a restricted room or a changing stage can organize attention.
A kitchen arranged as evidence
Trifles opens in the disordered kitchen of an abandoned farmhouse. Officials enter to investigate a death, accompanied by Mrs Peters and Mrs Hale. Unfinished domestic work is visible before anyone explains its significance: pans, bread, and a dish towel form part of the audience’s first impression.
The officials ask for an account of events while the women remain near the door. Position, hesitation, and permission to speak establish differences in authority. A remark about the household’s possible telephone is redirected toward the formal investigation. The scene makes the selection of relevant information part of the dramatic action without requiring a narrator to explain the distinction.
Reading what a performance would show
Read stage directions as carefully as dialogue. In Trifles, the women’s pace and proximity, the men’s movement toward the stove, and the handling of ordinary objects give actors material that a summary of speeches would omit. Avoid turning those directions into a single fixed interpretation before considering the exchanges around them.
Across the collection, ask whose account a room makes audible and whose experience is difficult to express there. The question connects the plays while leaving room for their different dramatic methods. The volume’s performance notices also distinguish the history of a production from the fictional time of a scene.