The Great Feminist Playwright Hidden in Plain Sight

In the first scene of Susan Glaspell’s 1921 play “The Verge,” now at New York City’s Public Theater through Nov. 22, a botanist named Claire Archer rushes her houseguests through what is supposed to be breakfast. Her husband, Harry, and their guests — Claire’s lover Dick and her best friend Tom (yes: Tom, Dick and Harry!) — have moved the gathering into Claire’s greenhouse. Outside, a snowstorm rages. 

The greenhouse is Claire’s sacred space and she is none-too-happy about the intrusion. But given that Claire has diverted the heat from the main house to protect her precious botanical experiments, who can blame them?

In the play, it’s freezing outside, but inside the greenhouse, the temperature is rising as the banter flies — alternately philosophical, suggestive, and biting. 

“A hostess calculated to put one at one’s ease,” Harry snarks at his wife. 

“I care nothing about your ease,” Claire replies, making no secret of the fact that she’s eager to send her company back out into the cold so she can return to her work: creating a plant that has never before existed.

The play, a Fiasco Theater production directed by Jessie Austrian, is more than a century old, but it doesn’t seem that way. “It feels so revolutionary that Claire invests all of her time and energy into her work — not in her marriage, her household, parenting or society,” says the Tony award–winning actor Miriam Silverman, who plays Claire. 

Indeed, Claire ultimately pushes away everyone she feels is holding her back, including her exasperated spouse, who misses the days when Claire was, in his words, “the best fun a woman could be.” 

To Claire, conformity and even sanity are traps. “Because you’ve gone dead in the form in which you found yourself, you think that’s all there is to the whole adventure?” she flings at Harry, who is planning to summon a neurologist for his “hysterical” wife.

Claire is unhinged, increasingly so as the play goes on, but more than that she is angry. Her scorn extends to her teenage daughter Elizabeth, who, within minutes of arriving for a visit, manages to turn her mother’s stomach with her prattle about fitting in with “all the girls” at boarding school and doing “the things one does.” When Elizabeth suggests she could help her mother make “better” flowers, Claire lashes out as though her daughter were a failed experiment herself: “To think that object ever moved my belly and sucked my breast!” Though Claire’s maternal coldness is tough to swallow, the playwright Glaspell is prodding us to examine our assumptions of how a mother — and a wife — ought to be. 

“I hope the audience feels challenged,” says Austrian, who formed Fiasco Theater with classmates from Brown University in 2009. 

Like so many of Glaspell’s female characters, Claire and Elizabeth (as well as Claire’s sister Adelaide, who we meet in the second act) “are representatives of different types of womanhood,” says J. Ellen Gainor, a Glaspell scholar and professor at Cornell University. “And none of them is idealized.”

At this point, you may be asking: Who was Susan Glaspell, anyway?

Born in 1876 in Davenport, Iowa, Susan Glaspell started her career as a reporter for the “Des Moines Daily News,” where she got her big break covering the trial of a farmer’s wife accused of murdering her husband with an axe. (Her visit to the crime scene later inspired her one-act play “Trifles” and short story “A Jury of Her Peers” — the two works she’s best known for today.)

Flouting her era’s gender expectations, Glaspell stayed single (and financially independent) well into her 30s. Unlike Claire, however, once married, she was devoted to her husband, fellow writer and intellectual George Cram Cook. After his death, she produced a glowing tribute to his life, while destroying much of the correspondence that would have told us more about her own. 

During her lifetime (she died in 1948, at age 72), Glaspell enjoyed success and even a measure of celebrity. And, as a writer of popular fiction, she was also the main breadwinner in her marriage. In all, she produced more than 50 short stories, many of which were published in widely read magazines; nine novels; and 15 plays. In 1931, she became the second woman ever to win a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, for “Alison’s House,” a play loosely based on the poet Emily Dickinson. The prior year, her novel “Brook Evans” was adapted into what would go on to become an Academy Award–nominated film, “The Right to Love.” 

After meeting in Iowa, Glaspell and her husband moved to New York City, where they fell in with the bohemian Greenwich Village crowd. The majority of her plays were premiered in that neighborhood by the small theatre company the couple co-founded, the Provincetown Players, so named for its initial location on Cape Cod, Mass., where the couple summered. The company played a pivotal role in launching modern American playwriting (including the career of a playwright most theatre buffs have heard of, Eugene O’Neill). Though critics in the U.S. were divided on Glaspell’s theatrical work, they were definitely talking about it; in England, she was favorably compared with Ibsen and Shaw.

Despite her success, after Glaspell’s death, her novels went out of print and her plays languished. “By the 1950s and early 1960s, when the myths and legends of this magical Greenwich Village period were being shaped, she somehow got lost in the telling,” writes Linda Ben-Zvi, a theatre scholar and the author of a 2005 biography of Glaspell. It wasn’t until 1979, Ben-Zvi writes, that “I became aware of the disturbingly familiar roles in which Susan Glaspell was cast: wife of George Cram Cook, nurturer of the Provincetown Players, friend of Eugene O’Neill, all traditional female parts.”

Thanks to a small coterie of academics like Ben-Zvi and Gainor, Glaspell’s work is being pushed back into the light — as is her feminism. Not only did she earn a college degree and establish a thriving career before American women had gained the right to vote; she was also a member of the Heterodoxy Club, founded in 1912 to foster discussion among free-thinking women, and frequented by such figures as the suffragist Inez Milholland; the author Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and the birth control advocate Mary Ware Dennett. No wonder, says Gainor, that “women are at the center of all of her plays.” 

One of Glaspell’s plays, “Chains of Dew,” juxtaposes a vivacious young New Yorker with the Midwestern women she meets while traveling the country to spread information about contraception; the work features a mother who donates $100 to the birth control movement for each of the seven children she bore (“seven is too many”). Glaspell also tackled subjects beyond gender, including in her play “Inheritors,” written in direct response to the Espionage and Sedition Acts, which were passed during World War I to stifle criticism of the U.S. government. 

“Just about every single large political debate that we are in right now is also in “Inheritors,” says Gainor — including free speech, race, immigration and the value of a college education.

Of all of Glaspell’s works, “The Verge,” with its unapologetically off-putting antiheroine, may be the most risky to stage, the dialogue veering from drawing-room repartee to feverish fragments of expressionist poetry. Its greenhouse setting full of alien plants includes a vine Claire is engineering that is (per Glaspell’s stage directions) “at once repellent and significant,” and you could say that these adjectives fit the play as well.

Austrian first heard about the play from Emily Lyon, the artistic director of Expand the Canon, a theatre initiative that shines a light on classic plays by women and underrepresented genders. Austrian says her hope is that audiences will sit with the discomfort and confront the questions the play raises, in exchange for a rare opportunity to experience a pioneering writer’s exploration of what it means to be a contemporary woman in a rapidly transforming world. 

“There is no use repeating old forms,” Glaspell told the “Morning Telegraph” in 1921, addressing the critiques she’d received for “The Verge.” “We are changing, and we should reflect that change.”