Susan Glaspell in Context provides new, accessible, and informative essays by leading international scholars and artists on Pulitzer Prize winner Susan Glaspell’s life, career development, writing, and ongoing global creative impact. The collection features wide-ranging discussions of Glaspell’s fiction, plays, and nonfiction in both historical and contemporary critical contexts and demonstrates the significance of Glaspell’s writing and other professional activities to a range of academic disciplines and artistic engagements. The volume also includes the first analyses of six previously unknown Glaspell short stories as well as discussions with contemporary stage and film artists who have produced Glaspell’s works or adapted them for audiences worldwide. Organized around key locations, influences, and phases in Glaspell’s career, as well as core methodological and pedagogical approaches to her work, the collection’s thirty-one essays place Glaspell in historical, geographical, political, cultural, and creative contexts of value to students, scholars, teachers, and artists alike.

The response to the Great War in both the commercial and the non-profit theater in the United States was substantial, with different trends emerging during the periods of U. S. neutrality, intervention, and postwar reflection. Although the Espionage Act squelched all but the most propagandistic pro-war plays and reviews, opposition to the war and the country’s entry into it was feely dramatized alongside pro-war plays before its passage. The country’s most celebrated playwright, Eugene O’Neill, explored the effects of war trauma during the war and its aftermath in The Sniper (1917), Shell Shock (1918), Strange Interlude (1928), and Mourning Becomes Electra (1931). In the decade after the war, Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings’s What Price Glory (1924) and its film adaptations, established a consciously realistic perspective on the war from the soldier’s point of view in America’s cultural consciousness. After the Armistice, pacifist views also found effective expression in the fantasy and historical analogy of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Aria da Capo (1919) and Robert Sherwood’s The Road to Rome (1927).

The standard historical narrative of American drama and theater tends to privilege male writers even more than the narratives of fiction or poetry do. In the historical narrative, the important aesthetic developments and cultural moments tend to be linked to the careers of playwrights, almost exclusively male, who have achieved fame, fortune, and critical acclaim, principally in the last 100 years. Thus Eugene O’Neill is linked with early realism and modernism; Clifford Odets with the leftist theater of the 1930s; Tennessee Williams with post-World War II psychological realism; Arthur Miller with politically minded realism; Edward Albee with absurdist drama; Sam Shepard with hyperrealism and postmodernism; David Mamet with a tough dialogic realism characterized by the pseudonymous “Mametspeak”; Tony Kushner with an open, epic theater that addresses issues of politics, identity, and religious myth; August Wilson with African American history, myth, and identity. A similar list of female writers and their cultural moments might include Rachel Crothers with the social realism of the Progressive Era and the society comedy of the Jazz Age; Susan Glaspell with feminist realism and modernism; Lillian Hellman with the social melodrama of the 1930s and ’40s; Lorraine Hansberry with the social realism of the Civil Rights movement; Adrienne Kennedy and Alice Childress with experimental hybrid dramatic forms in the 1950s and ’60s; Mar´ıa Irene Forn´es, Ntozake Shange, and Megan Terry with feminist experiments in the 1970s; Marsha Norman, Wendy Wasserstein, and Beth Henley with a neo-realism that emphasizes women’s issues in the 1970s and ’80s; and, into the twenty-first century, Paula Vogel with an open dramatic form and a focus on family, gender, and identity; Suzan-Lori Parks with remaking both dramatic structure and American history and myth; Anna Deavere Smith and Eve Ensler with a new, socially aware monologic theater.

By his own account, Arthur Miller’s admiration for the classical Greek dramatists began with his earliest efforts at playwriting, when he was a student at the University of Michigan. “When I began to write,” he has said in an interview, “one assumed inevitably that one was in the mainstream that began with Aeschylus and went through about twenty-five hundred years of playwriting.” Asked in 1966 which playwrights he admired most when he was young, he replied, “first the Greeks, for their magnificent form, the symmetry. Half the time I couldn’t really repeat the story because the characters in the mythology were completely blank to me. I had no background at that time to know really what was involved in these plays, but the architecture was clear … That form has never left me; I suppose it just got burned in” (Martin, Theater Essays, pp. 265–66). He has written in his autobiography Timebends that, once he began to write plays and “confront dramatic problems” himself, he “read differently than [he] had before, in every period of Western drama” (p. 232). Regarding these plays no longer as “marble masterworks but improvisations that their authors had simply given up trying to perfect” gave Miller a new perspective on the classics:

Americans were well prepared for the first US tour of the Abbey Players in 1911 by those intrepid advance men, William Butler Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory. In August, before the departure of the Players for their 16 October opening in Boston, both of the theatre's directors were giving publicity interviews to American reporters, which were carefully couched to address anticipated objections to two of the plays in the repertory, G. B. Shaw's The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet and J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World. In an interview for a South Carolina newspaper, Yeats told the story of the 1907 Playboy riots. Expressing outrage that 'violence' had been used against the 'chief work of the chief dramatist of Ireland', Yeats explained that although some 'dislike' had been expected for 'a fantasy so strange and full of mischief', violence that was 'intended to prevent others from hearing and judging for themselves' could only have been dealt with by calling in the police. Yeats exulted that the Abbey Players had won their fight before the week was out, and not only did the curtain fall to 'thunders of applause' at Dublin performances, but The Playboy continued to be presented in Dublin to 'enthusiastic and crowded audiences - some of the rioters sitting there and applauding', and in England and on the continent, 'the play had won not only for Synge but for the Ireland that produced him, admiration and respect'.

August Wilson described the creative process that produced Seven Guitars (1995) in a 1996 interview with Jan Breslauer. Fundamentally, he said, 'the basis is character'. He suggested that the characters occurred to him first in the form of a speech, or a turn of phrase, noting that although 'they're all different aspects of my personality', they are all also 'voices of the black community.' He described his creative work as analogous to that of a collagist, piecing the voices together to make a whole. In the case of Seven Guitars, this is particularly important, for, as he told Carol Rosen, Wilson conceived of the seven characters in the play as instruments themselves: 'They are the seven guitars. They each have their individual voices and their individual characters. And if they're the guitars, then I guess I'm the orchestra.' It took Wilson some time to arrive at the design for the play. He explained later that it began its life in his imagination with four characters, none of them women, set in a turpentine camp in Georgia. Lacking any knowledge of turpentine camps, he had the idea of moving the play to Chicago, 'the natural place for a bluesman', and found that he was 'writing a play set in the 1940's that was supposed to be somehow representative of black American life, and I didn't have any women in there. And I knew that wasn't going to work.'

In the play as Wilson finally wrote it, there are seven characters, the blues musician Floyd Barton, his two sidemen, or supporting musicians, drummer Red Carter and harmonica player Canewell, Canewell's girlfriend Vera, and three people who live in Vera's house: Louise, a middle-aged single woman whose beautiful young niece Ruby comes to stay with her, and King Hedley, a West Indian who lives in his dreams.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the American theatre was for the most part a medium of mass entertainment. In the cities, the theatre meant popular melodrama in enormous theatres like the Bowery in New York as well as the likes of Sarah Bernhardt from France touring in plays by Rostand and Racine and Ellen Terry and Henry Irving from England playing in Shakespeare and Shaw. American stars E. H. Sothern, Julia Marlowe, and Richard Mansfield acted in Shakespeare, and Ethel, Lionel, and John Barrymore starred in contemporary plays by American and English writers. The theatre also meant numerous American companies touring in old American standards like the ubiquitous Uncle Tom's Cabin and James O'Neill's thirty-year vehicle, Monte Cristo. Increasingly risqué revues like the Ziegfeld Follies played alongside minstrel shows and the wholesome family entertainment of vaudeville. To the early twentieth-century public, the theatre included burlesque, circus, and “extravaganza,” as well as the Yiddish theatre, the settlement house theatre, and the puppet theatre.

Since the beginning of Albee's career, his plays have been pervaded by arresting and memorable images of death. Grandma scoops sand over herself with a toy shovel as she succumbs to the smiling angel of death in The Sandbox (1960). The nurse complains that “the nigger brought a dead woman here” in The Death of Bessie Smith (1960). George makes the “flores para los muertos” allusion and reads the Catholic Requiem liturgy after the death of the imaginary son in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). During the late 1960s and 1970s, Albee's interest in death and dying intensified, and he produced a series of plays that explored the process of dying, and the experience of the survivors who witness it, in Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (1968), All Over (1971), and The Lady from Dubuque (1980). Of these plays, All Over and The Lady from Dubuque are rare twentieth-century dramas in the mode of the threnody, the funeral dirge or song of lamentation. Another decade later, in Three Tall Women (1991), Albee returned to the threnody in a very different frame of mind.

Both elusive and allusive, the title Oleanna is a good introduction to the play's linguistic strategies. It was so bewildering to the first audiences and critics that David Mamet added the epigraph from a folk song he had sung at camp to the published version:

Oleanna was a nineteenth-century utopian community founded by the Norwegian violinist Ole Bull and his wife Anna: thus “Oleanna.” This agricultural community failed because the land it had bought was rocky and infertile, and the settlers had to return to Norway. The application to the failed utopian dream of academia becomes evident as the play unfolds, as does the application of Mamet's second epigraph, from Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, which suggests that children who have never known “a genial mental atmosphere” do not recognize its absence, and are easily prevented from finding it out, “or at any rate from attributing it to any other cause than their own sinfulness.”