New Athens Players' "Susan Glaspell & Friends" at Augustana College's Honkamp Myhre Black Box Theatre -- July 30.
Tuesday, July 30, 7 p.m.
Augustana College's Honkamp Myhre Black Box Theatre, 3750 Seventh Avenue, Rock Island IL
Following the success of last year's Spotlight on Susan Glaspell by the debuting theatre company New Athens Players and its founder (and Reader theatre reviewer) Mischa Hooker, the play's reader's-theatre followup Susan Glaspell & Friends will enjoy a July 30 presentation at Augustana College's Honkamp Myhre Black Box Theatre, the evening a celebration of works by Davenport writer Glaspell and two of her fellow females connected to the highly influential Provincetown Players: Edna Ferber and Djuna Barnes.
On the program will be two one-act plays by Glaspell, Woman's Honor and The Outside, and complementing those are Ferber's The Eldest and Barnes' At the Roots of the Stars, which also address themes of women's lives and losses. This focus on women’s perspectives is especially significant in these works from the years leading up to the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. These four pieces showcase a clear-eyed realism about everyday misery, as well as lyrical and expressionistic hopes of going beyond one's conventional limitations.
"I wanted to do more plays connected to Susan Glaspell," says Hooker, "and I've been wanting to explore her one-acts. But I also didn't want to do a whole bunch of them together too fast – so I decided to mix two of them with some other pieces that are thematically relevant and relevant to her history with the Provincetown Players."
The New Athens Players was founded with the aim of celebrating the work and legacy of Susan Glaspell, given that she was a ground-breaking, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of plays, novels, and short stories from the QCA who is still not as well known as she should be. Likewise, it is inspired by example of the Provincetown Players she founded (with her husband George Cram Cook, or “Jig” Cook) to a continuous exploration of our creative capabilities, just as the Provincetown Players provoked and challenged each other to revolutionize the American theater of their time. The inaugural production of the New Athens Players was 2023's Spotlight on Susan Glaspell, which included three fully staged short plays: The Rules of the Institution, adapted by Hooker from a short story by Glaspell; An Iowa Seer Comes Home to Greece, composed by Hooker from reminiscences of Jig Cook (by Susan Glaspell and Floyd Dell) as well as poetry written by Cook himself; and Glaspell’s most well known play, Trifles.
In explaining how he linked Glaspell's works with those of Ferber and Barnes for Susan Glaspell & Friends, Hooker says, "In her focus on women's lives and perspectives, Susan Glaspell makes a nice thematic parallel to a few other people of the time. The Provincetown Players were using a lot of women writers and women as actors in their plays – making gender kind of a big deal. And of course that's part of the Bohemian lifestyle – throwing off some of the shackles of traditional sexual or marriage norms, or at least experimenting with them. This is also the time when there's a big push for votes for women, and birth control – a lot of issues that are eerily relevant today.
"So Djuna Barnes came up," Hooker continues, "as one of the people who wrote a few pieces that were produced by Provincetown. But compared to Glaspell, I would say she's more experimental, more flamboyantly out there, and is kind of an icon of queer culture in some ways. Writing about lesbianism, writing about living in Paris as opposed to staying in New York. Whereas Edna Ferber is someone who has a tangential relationship to the Bohemians, but is otherwise much more of a mainstream writer, as some of her work shows when she gets into the movies and musicals of the period. But she still shows that same connection – a realistic approach to modern women and their lives and conundrums and frustrations."
With Hooker directing the four pieces in the July 30 reader's-theatre presentation, Woman's Honor features Michael Carron, Mark Garden, Dan Haughey, Sophia Kilburg, Dee Canfield, Sara Kutzli, Jane Simonsen, Julia Sears, and Hooker's fellow Reader theatre reviewer Pamela Briggs. Glaspell's The Outside will also feature Briggs, Carron, Garden, Haughey, Kilburg, and Simonsen. Edna Ferber's The Eldest includes Noah Stivers alongside Garden, Sears, Kilburg, Canfield, Briggs, Carron, and Haughey. And Djuna Barnes' At the Roots of the Stars boasts the quartet of Haughey, Canfield, Briggs, and Sears.
"What I see is that each of these pieces touches on the theme of women's lives," says Hooker, "but each one through a pretty different perspective with different writing styles, and it goes from realism to a kind of fantasy, almost, in the Djuna Barnes piece. It's very poetic and flowing ... and nothing really happens," he adds with a laugh. "It's just two women having a talk in the basement. But that's perfect for reader's theatre."
The New Athens Players' Susan Glaspell & Friends will be presented in the Honkamp Myhre Black Box Theatre of Augustana College's Brunner Theatre Center on July 30, admission to the 7 p.m. reader's-theatre performance is free, and more information is available by visiting Facebook.com/NewAthensPlayers.
