Archive - 2007

American Literature Association 18^th Annual Conference
May 24-27, Boston MA

Susan Glaspell Society Sponsored Panel

The Grotesque in the Work of Susan Glaspell, Djuna Barnes, Zora Neale Hurston,
and Their Modernist Contemporaries"

Friday May 25, 2:00-3:20

Chair:  Mary E. Papke, University of Tennessee

As Philip Thomson argues in his The Grotesque, the grotesque depends for its effect on disharmony and ambiguity, an interruption of the normal by an eruption of the freakish, the ominous, and the estranged.  He goes on to argue that it most often appears in art and literature during periods of great strife, radical change, or profound disorientation, periods, that is, like that of the modernists in which artists responded in their works to both national and international crises and possibilities.  The American literary grotesque is exemplified in the work of Edgar Allan Poe and Flannery O'Connor, but it is not totally surprising that it also figures in important ways in the work of early modernists who were determined to break with the sentimental and romantic movements that preceded their emergence and to make of American literature something shockingly new.  The grotesque in art is typically defined as work in which the natural and the monstrous are intertwined in bizarre or fanciful combinations; somewhat strangely, then, the grotesque character elicits from the reader both disgust and empathy in that such a character repulses us even as it whets our desire to understand its otherness.  In Glaspell's work, we see the grotesque emerge both in her plays (such as The Verge) and in her novels (Fugitive's Return, for example), two examples that indicate well the different uses to which the grotesque can be put.  Other modernists employ the grotesque in similarly innovative ways. 

Papers and Presenters:

"'Getting at things in terms of the preposterous':  The Satiric Grotesque in Susan Glaspell's
World War I-Era Stories," Martha C. Carpentier, Seton Hall University

"Macabre Revelations: The Grotesque and Eugenics in Glaspell and MacKaye," Kimberly A. Miller, Fort Hays State University

"The Grotesque Tradition and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God," Mary McAleer Balkun, Seton Hall University

 

American Century Theater produces Trifles and Suppressed Desires

From February 23 to March 24, 2007, The American Century Theater (TACT) of Arlington, Virginia produced two Susan Glaspell works, Trifles and Suppressed Desires, as part of a bill of seven one-act plays written by American women dramatists from around the Prohibition era. The bill of one-acts appears to have been the brainchild of TACT Director Steven Scott Mazzola, who assembled the plays in conjunction with Lillian Hellman biographer Deborah Martinson. . . . Glaspell's Trifles, the second play on the bill, received a simple, heartfelt rendering by Mazzola and cast.  Perhaps the most unusual feature of the staging was the nontraditional casting of Tanera Hutz, a highly effective African-American actress, in the role of Mrs. Peters . . . Critic Jackson termed Trifles "a masterpiece," and Doug Krentzlin for Examiner.com found the play "by far, the most effective" of those produced.  Susan Berlin, writing for TalkingBroadway.com, showed that much work is still needed in resuscitating Glaspell's reputation by referring to the production of Trifles as an "interesting discovery." . . . Glaspell and George Cram Cook's Suppressed Desires rounded out the bill, followed only by a brief coda from Stein's Photograph.  Oddly, TACT's playbill does not credit Cook with co-authorship and slightly misrepresents the title as Suppressed Desire.  Nevertheless, the play was performed with broad gusto by Mary McGowan, William Aitken, and Jennifer B. Robison, and the playfulness of the early twentieth-century satire clearly still resonated, evoking frequent and long laughter throughout.  Krentzlin found the play "a hilarious send-up of Freudian psychoanalysis" and the critic for Alexandria's Del Ray Sun termed it "deliciously sardonic."  Trey Graham of the Washington City Paper offered perhaps the most succinct and memorable response: "Glaspell's head-shrink play is a riot." . . .

TACT dramaturg Andy White organized a post-show seminar on March 17 with prominent scholars associated with the produced playwrights.  The seminar, initially suggested by Glaspell Society member J. Ellen Gainor, included Sarah Bay-Cheng (Stein scholar), Kathy Perkins (Spence), Jerry Dickey (Treadwell), White and director Mazzola.  Gainor began the seminar with information on Glaspell and the background to Trifles and Suppressed Desires.

Submitted by Jerry Dickey, University of Arizona