Provincetown Players I

During the summers of 1915 and 1916, while the First World War raged in Europe, a small group of writers and artists fled the heat of Greenwich Village in New York City, escaping to the small sleepy fishing village of Provincetown, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. There these talented playwrights, poets, journalists, painters, set-designers and socialites spent the days working and, in the evenings, entertained themselves and friends by staging plays, first in their living rooms and then in a make-shift theatre on Lewis Wharf. In the course of their first summer, this avant-garde band of bohemians staged four plays and began to call themselves the Provincetown Players.

With the summer of 1916, another young struggling playwright was introduced into this circle of creative talent. Eugene O'Neill arrived on the scene. That summer the Provincetown Players staged two of O'Neill's plays, Bound East for Cardiff and Thirst, launching the career of America's fist modern playwright. As Susan Glaspell wrote, the group "knew what we were for" after a reading of O'Neill's Bound East.

At the end of the summer of 1916, many of the Players moved back to Greenwich Village, intent on continuing to produce new American plays. After starting in one small theatre on MacDougal Street, they moved to larger facility on the same street, naming it the Provincetown Theatre. Through the 1920s, the group produced experimental theatre by American playwrights, promoting especially O'Neill's plays.

As difficulties arose over focus and ideology, the group began to change. Some of the members moved on to pursue other projects, while new talented artists, such as Edna St. Vincent Millay, joined. The theatre could not survive the impact of the stock market crash and closed its doors in 1929. By that time, the Provincetown Players, with their dedication to presenting new innovative dramatic works by American playwrights, had left an indelible mark on the Little Theatre movement in America.

Production photograph from Bound East for Cardiff. [Provincetown, MA], 1916. Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.

O’Neill stands on the ladder to the left.