Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) was a woman of many talents, can be considered a woman before her time and a central figure in modern American theater history. She is also included as an American Master in Performing Arts at CCBC 2018-2019 Season. Glaspell is primarily recognized as the author of Trifles, a play about two women who secretly discover a wife’s murder of her husband and the rewritten version of this play, A Jury of Her Peers.
She was born in Davenport, Iowa. Rather than conform to society’s expectations and wait for a husband to appear, she attended Drake University, graduating in June 1899 and began her career as a journalist and reporter for the Des Moines Daily News. Having a number of her short stories published and accepted by Youth’s Companion, Harpers, Leslie’s, The American and others, gave her the incentive to leave her newspaper job and return to her hometown to work as a freelance writer.
She was an active participant in Davenport’s literary and political circles and met George Cram Cook, they married in 1913. Surrounded by scandal and gossip from Cook’s second divorce they were compelled to relocate, they headed East and settled in free-thinking liberal and radical Greenwich Village. They spent their summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts where they co-founded the Provincetown Players with Eugene O’Neill. Glaspell wrote numerous plays that dealt with realism (Trifles 1916), included satiric comedy (Woman’s Honor 1918), and were lyrical and expressionistic (The Verge 1921).
We all go through the same things – it’s all just a different kind of the same thing.
See The Verge at CCBC Essex, Robert and Eleanor Romadka College Center | F. Scott Black Theatre
October 18 at 11:10 a.m., October 19, 20 at 7 p.m., October 21 at 3 p.m. (ASL Interpreted), October 22 at 10 a.m.
Purchase tickets online or call the Box Office at 443-840-ARTS.