Obie Award winner Metropolitan Playhouse presents a new free "screened" reading, live-streamed at no charge, and a talkback to follow: TRIFES, by Susan Glaspell. Streaming begins May 8, 2021 at 8:00 pm (Eastern) through May 12, 2021 at 10:00 pm (Eastern). Available at: www.MetropolitanPlayhouse.org/watchtrifles
A death at a remote, midwestern farmhouse is investigated by a local sheriff, a neighbor of the deceased, and an ambitious young District Attorney. As the men look for clues throughout the house, their wives confine themselves to the kitchen, where they are charged with tidying up. As they do, household "trifles" literally bring to hand the who, what, and why of a bitter domestic conflict, a passionate crime. But will the truth need to come out?
Trifles was a groundbreaking feminist play that has captured critical and popular imagination for over one hundred years. Disguised as a quaint whodunnit, the play offers quietly subversive affirmation of the significance of everyday objects in all they represent: unacknowledged labor, stifled passions, daily conflicts, struggles for agency, and lost histories that are buried day by day, even as they unfold.
Discussion including audience participation follows the reading with Linda Ben Zvi, of Tel Aviv University, Professor emerita in English and Theatre, Colorado State University, and author of
Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times
The reading is directed by Laura Livingston and features
Quinlan Corbett, Michael Durkin, Anne Fizzard,
Susanna Frazer, and
Peter Tedeschi. Virtual Settings by Pamela Lawton and Danny Licul.
Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) was a well-known and best-selling author, and Trifles is a staple of American anthologies. But after her death her work fell into relative obscurity. In the 70s her work received new attention and now she is recognized as an important feminist voice from the early century, though it is still rarely seen. The daughter of a hay farmer and school-teacher in rural Iowa, earned her BA at Drake University in 1899 and began work as a journalist for the Des Moines Daily News. She returned in 1901 to Davenport to concentrate on creative writing, and by 1911 had published two novels and stories in numerous magazines. In 1913, she married Author and "free thinker"
George Cram Cook, and to escape the gossip of their Mid Western community--he was already twice divorced, and a socialist who had given up a university career to truck farm--the two resettled among like-minded political and artistic spirits, including
John Reed and Mabel Dodge, in Greenwich Village.
Glaspell and Cook were among the founders of the
Provincetown Playhouse, established with friends from New York in the summer of 1915 on a wharf building in Provincetown, MA. But after seven years steering that renowned institution through its triumphs in New York, they grew disenchanted with the Broadway aspirations and infighting of fellow Players, and left to live a simple, rustic life in Greece in 1922. She returned to settle in Provincetown following Cook's death in 1924, from a disease caught from his pet dog. She continued writing, chiefly novels, though this was the period during which she produced Alison's House, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1931. She also served for a director of the Midwest Play Bureau for the WPA's Federal Theater Project in 1936, but resigned after two years. Returning again to Provincetown, she devoted her remaining years to writing fiction. Among her 15 plays are the one-acts Suppressed Desires (1915, with Cook), and Trifles (1916), an
d full-length plays Inheritors (1921, produced by Metropolitan in 2005), The Verge (1921) and Alison's House (1930, produced by Metropolitan in 2015).
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