In the inaugural programme for the Provincetown Playhouse, which opened on 4 January 1924 with a production of The Ghost Sonata, Eugene O'Neill acknowledged Strindberg as 'the precursor of all modernity in our present theatre' and insisted he remained 'among the most modern of moderns'. The Provincetown Players rediscovered in what O'Neill called Strindberg's later plays elements of a theatrical aesthetic which they themselves advocated as the dominating form of modernism. Strindberg's view of man and his radically new stagecraft presented the necessary challenge to their own attempts to transcend realism and the Provincetown production of The Ghost Sonata was followed in 1926 by A Dream Play. Strindberg and the plays he wrote after his Inferno crisis thus paved the way for the experimental studio theatre in MacDougal Street under the banner of modernism, the general notion being one of revolutionary change from a mimetic realism, as defined by preceding generations of theatre practitioners in its use of language and dramaturgical techniques.

Strindberg's post-Inferno plays are first of all stories, remembered because of what happened and mattered to him. Below the tangled pattern of events, as well as behind the action, there are experiences, psychological realities of passionate importance to him. These accumulations of passion, sin and suffering were recorded by the dramatist and told in different ways upon the stage. His plays represent incomplete and imperfect actions, which always assert their place in the larger pattern of history. On stage his plays assume universal significance and simultaneously point inward to central meanings, yet trail behind them the roots of his Inferno experiences.