ABSTRACT
The Verge (1921) was the last play that Susan Glaspell would write for the Provincetown Players. She wrote it for an audience that she had come to know intimately, an audience that, for almost seven years, the Players had been training to appreciate their spirit of serious and yet playful innovation, and it marked the culmination of her theatrical development. With The Verge, Glaspell was finally able to break through the despised “patterns” of Broadway plays (Glaspell 1927: 248) she had been escaping from in her earlier work. With this full-length drama, she demanded more from her audience than she had ever dared before, provoking extreme reactions from spectators and reviewers. On the whole, women responded positively to this play, while male colleagues and reviewers were frequently baffled. One contemporary reviewer noted scathingly that “Nothing pleases the merry, merry Greenwich Villagers so much as a well misdirected idea which nobody quite understands” (Dickinson 1921). Others, however, recognized that Glaspell was stretching modernist, avant-garde and feminist concepts of theater to their very limits and were able to praise even if they did not quite understand the play. Ludwig Lewisohn, writing for the Nation, celebrated the “touch of that vision without which we perish” communicated by The Verge, and he praised both the “dramatic structure” of the play, which he considered to be “clear and clean and firm” and the “delicately and precisely wrought” dialogue (Lewisohn 1921). Kenneth Macgowan, an influential drama critic of the time who congratulated himself on his openness to
avant-garde developments in the theater, managed to fuse both negative and positive reactions in his review for the New York Evening Globe when he wrote:
It is impossible to call the effort of the play a success, as other plays achieve their purpose. It is just as impossible to deny that, for the tiny audience of the keen, the sensitive, the genuinely philosophic, here is the most remarkable dramatic document that they have ever come across. However much of The Verge is unclear in the theatre, there must always be, for its special audience, extraordinary passages of meaning.
