Cambridge University Press The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama, Series Number 23)

The Provincetown Players was a major cultural institution in Greenwich Village from 1916 to 1922, when American Modernism was conceived and developed. This study considers the group's vital role, and its wider significance in twentieth-century American culture. Describing the varied and often contentious response to modernity among the Players, Murphy reveals the central contribution of the group of poets around Alfred Kreymborg's Others magazine, including William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Mina Loy and Djuna Barnes, and such modernist artists as Marguerite and William Zorach, Charles Demuth and Bror Nordfeldt, to the Players' developing modernist aesthetics. The impact of their modernist art and ideas on such central Provincetown figures as Eugene O'Neill, Susan Glaspell, and Edna St Vincent Millay and a second generation of artists, such as e. e. cummings and Edmund Wilson, who wrote plays for the Provincetown Playhouse, is evident in Murphy's close analysis of over thirty plays. Review An engaging study of the intersections and divergences of ideas about modernism as they were developed and played out on the stages, in the plays and in the group dynamics of the Provincetown Players. -- Choice"For those unfamilia with the history of the Provincetown Players, Brenda Murphy's book is an excellent introduction, which she builds on the best of the scholarly work that has preceded her." -Lois Rudnick, American Studies Book Description A study of the most influential theatre group of the twentieth century, the Provincetown Players. About the Author Brenda Murphy is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of O'Neill: Long Day's Journey into Night (2001), Congressional Theatre: Dramatizing McCarthyism on Stage, Film and Television (1999), Miller: Death of a Salesman (1995), Tennessee WIlliams and Elia Kazan: A Collaboration in the Theatre (1992), and American Realism and American Drama, 1880-1940 (1987), all published by Cambridge University Press. She has edited Understanding Death of a Salesman (with Susan Abbotson, 1999), The Cambridge Companion to American Women Playwrights (1999), and A Realist in the American Theatre: Selected Drama Criticism of William Dean Howells (1992). She is the author of many articles and reviews on drama and American literature, which have appeared in such journals as Modern Drama, Theatre Journal and American Literature, and she has contributed chapters to many titles in the Cambridge Companions series.