ABSTRACT
The one-act play Trifles was described by Ines Haynes Irwin, Susan Glaspell’s militant feminist friend, as “the grimmest, tensest half-hour of tragedy ever produced: a very arrow-flight of poignancy” (Irwin 1922). It was Glaspell’s first solo incursion into drama, and the experience convinced her that the medium of the theater was well suited to her Shavian desire to subvert given opinions and behaviors. Assured of a stage for her plays, she devoted the following seven years to drama. Trifles, first published by Frank Shay in 1916, is her most frequently anthologized piece and as such is her best-known and most taught play, although, as should be clear by now, the rest of her dramatic oeuvre merits attention for the ways in which she went beyond this initiating experiment which, according to the contemporary drama critic Ludwig Lewisohn, “sums up . . . all the qualities and trends of those early years [of the beginnings of the American theater]” (Lewisohn 1931: 393). In 1917, Glaspell reworked Trifles into a short story, “A Jury of Her Peers,” which she published in the magazine Everyweek (March 1917) and which has been better known and more frequently anthologized than the original play till quite recently.
