Provincetown Players
Uploaded by nukrolat on Sep 18, 2002
Provincetown town (township), Barnstable county, eastern Massachusetts, U.S., at the northern tip of Cape Cod. It is located among sand dunes within a fishhook-shaped harbour that was visited by the explorers Bartholomew Gosnold in 1602 and Henry Hudson in 1609. Before the Pilgrims founded Plymouth, they landed there. An event that is now commemorated on Nov. 21. It was on board the Mayflower in Provincetown harbour where the first European child in New England (Peregrine White) was born. The Pilgrim Monument (built in 1907–10) and Provincetown Museum (both on High Pole Hill) commemorate these events. Traders and fishermen settled the site prior to 1700; the community, known as the Precinct of Cape Cod or Province Lands, was part of Truro until it was separately incorporated in 1727 as Provincetown. Exposed to repeated seaborne attacks, it was abandoned during the French and Indian Wars (1754–63) and the American Revolution (1775–83). Its harbour was used by the British as a naval base during the Revolution and during the War of 1812.
As an active whaling and fishing port in the 19th century, Provincetown attracted large numbers of Portuguese fishermen, whose descendants still maintain a fleet there. Salt making (by evaporating seawater) was long an important activity. Bounded by the Cape Cod National Seashore, Provincetown is a popular summer resort and noted artists' colony. A longtime resident was Eugene O'Neill, whose first produced play, Bound East for Cardiff, was staged there in 1916 by the Provincetown Players. In the latter part of the 20th century the town also became known for its gay community.
Provincetown Players
In 1915, at their summer home in Provincetown on Cape Cod, Susan Glaspell and George Cram Cook (Glaspell's husband) organized a group of local artists as an amateur theatre group and staged a number of one-act plays in a converted fish warehouse. The next year Eugene O'Neill was introduced to the group, which soon became more formally organized as the Provincetown Players. They began performing in 1915 in Provincetown. The theatre was founded with the common aim of producing new and highly experimental plays. Among the original Provincetowners who staged the first plays in in the Wharf Theater were Mary Heaton Vorse, George Cram Cook, Susan Glaspell, Hutchins Hapgood, Wilbur Steele, and Robert Edmond Jones.
In 1916 the group produced in Wharf Theatre, Eugene O'Neill's “Bound East for Cardiff” and “Thirst”, thus launching the career of one of America's distinguished...