ABSTRACT
The short plays that Glaspell wrote during the first years of the Provincetown Players provided her with valuable experience in dramatic writing and production. Although one of the early tenets of the Players had been that authors should direct their own plays, Glaspell preferred to act rather than direct. She took a part in almost all her early plays and merited the praise of the French director Jacques Copeau for the authenticity and purity of her interpretation of the Woman of Idaho in The People (Ozieblo 2000: 110). In Bernice she played the part of Abbie and was declared “not technically adept” by the reviewer Heywood Broun, who, however, admitted that “she plays with convincing spirit and feeling” (Broun 1919). In the early plays, Glaspell experimented with the trends of modernist European drama as she forged a style of her own with the express design to move her audiences to rethink their conventional attitudes. In Bernice (1919), her first three-act play, Glaspell continues her discussion of the relationships between men and women on which she had embarked, more covertly, in The Outside, but in this play it is the husband, Craig, who is clearly “outside” the women’s community she has created.
