Provincetown Players

Provincetown town (township), Barnstable county, eastern Massachusetts, U.S., at the northern tip of Cape Cod. It is positioned amongst sand dunes inside a fishhook-shaped harbour that was visited by the explorers Bartholomew Gosnold in 1602 and Henry Hudson in 1609. Prior to the Pilgrims founded Plymouth, they landed there. An occasion that is now commemorated on Nov. 21. It was on board the Mayflower in Provincetown harbour where the very first European kid 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 website prior to 1700 the community, identified as the Precinct of Cape Cod or Province Lands, was component of Truro till it was separately incorporated in 1727 as Provincetown. Exposed to repeated seaborne attacks, it was abandoned for the duration of the French and Indian Wars (1754–63) and the American Revolution (1775–83). Its harbour was used by the British as a naval base for the duration of the Revolution and through the War of 1812.

As an active whaling and fishing port in the 19th century, Provincetown attracted large numbers of Portuguese fishermen, whose descendants nonetheless maintain a fleet there. Salt producing (by evaporating seawater) was long an critical activity. Bounded by the Cape Cod National Seashore, Provincetown is a common summer time resort and noted artists’ colony. A longtime resident was Eugene O’Neill, whose very first made play, Bound East for Cardiff, was staged there in 1916 by the Provincetown Players. In the latter portion of the 20th century the town also became identified 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 regional artists as an amateur theatre group and staged a number of one-act plays in a converted fish warehouse. The subsequent 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 popular aim of producing new and very experimental plays. Amongst the original Provincetowners who staged the 1st 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 a single of America’s distinguished…

Leave a Reply