Plays

A cofounder of the Provincetown Players and winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) was one of the first female playwrights. Although long neglected, the four plays collected in this critical edition reveal the thoroughly modern nature of her concerns. Trifles (1916) develops a feminist critique of social role, while The Outside (1917) stages a debate between the life force and a perverse celebration of death. In The Verge (1921), Glaspell presented an experimental work of considerable proportions, more daring in many ways than anything attempted by O'Neill.