Alison's House


		Metropolitan Playhouse The American Legacy 220 East Fourth Street ~ New York, New York 10009 (212) 995 8410 connect@metropolitanplayhouse.org "Theatrical archaeologist extraordinaire" - - Back Stage						Follow us....
Home	Playing	Next	Season	Tickets	Company	Location	Mission	History	Links

Alison's House

“Dust is the only secret” Does the private life of a public figure belong to the world? It is a question of our time, in the age of YouTube, selfies, and instant broadcasts, but Susan Glaspell’s Alison’s House, a play from 1930 set in 1899, starts with this very question. Its answer is found in our deeply personal need to follow our own hearts while attempting to embrace family, home, and the wider world. New Year’s Eve, 1899, finds the Stanhope family selling its Iowa homestead, and the sale means unwelcome exposure for an already public family. Pillars of the community, they are also the family of Alison Stanhope, who rose to literary prominence after her death, when her siblings published her transcendent poetry. With the house in turmoil, a Chicago reporter arrives, hoping to find one last story in the reclusive Alison’s possessions. Her surviving siblings want no more eyes prying into their late sister’s life, but her adult niece and nephews see everything about her as belonging to the world. When they discover a portfolio of hitherto unknown papers, the house’s disruption becomes a question of where family history ends and literary legacy begins. Emily Dickinson was the model for Alison’s House, but Glaspell was refused permission to use the Dickinson name by the poet’s heirs. So she created a fictional poet with a parallel life and legacy. Dickinson, like Alison, lived a guarded private life, and the great majority of her work was published only after her death. Speculation about her private life, from merely intrusive to wild, has swirled ever since. “Safe in their alabaster chambers” In this literary inspiration, Glaspell finds far-reaching concerns. Broadly, she weighs the shifting balance of private life and public responsibility. In 1930, she wrote in the long wake of WWI, the first Red Scare, the dramatic growth of cities in the 20’s, that age’s economic excesses, and the Crash of 1929. Set literally at the dawn of the new century, the play points to a comparable moment of cultural transition, following the Spanish - American War, the immigration waves of the 19th century, that era’s explosive urban expansion, and amidst the Gilded Age’s economic excesses and market panics. More specifically, she speaks to both ages’ anxieties over changing social contracts. A key threat to the Stanhopes’ privacy is the arrival of the young reporter, who wants a photograph of a family member. The intrusions of mass-circulation newspapers and the violations afforded by the development of film photography were topical fire in 1900—akin to today’s anxieties over internet gossip and cell-phone cameras. The changing world simply will not let rules of decorum and intimacy stand long. Finally, less topically, and most potently, the play is about the transition of generations. Every generation is cursed to watch its children disobey its rules, often with righteous delight and galling impunity. And every generation of children is cursed to learn that bridling at parents’ reins breaks ties that bind. But a changing world demands new rules, and to persevere in thrall to old ways is folly when tradition proves more punitive than protective. The elder Stanhopes uphold the ways of the 19th Century, while the younger heirs persistently challenge them. Over the course of the play, it is increasingly evident that the parents’ protection of their late sister’s private life is really protection of their own status and, even more, justification of their own lives of self-denial. For their part, the children are each buckling under the weight of these social mores, and their wish to free their aunt’s legacy is equally a wish to free themselves. In this conflict, the play finds the many complexions of love, the blessing of generosity, and the devastating cold of loneliness. “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant” Finding drama in generational conflict is nothing novel. But Alison’s House exemplifies Glaspell’s distinctive, playful, and subtle gift for dramatizing elusive truths. From her wry twists of theatrical conventions to her obliquely incisive dialogue, her play subverts to hit its marks. The extreme lengths to which characters go pursuing their respective aims make the plot of the play, which hangs on conventions from the century her characters are leaving. Hidden documents, illicit loves, children of questionable parentage, and even an offstage conflagration are the stuff of 19th century melodrama. But in Glaspell’s hands, each of these devices resolves with subtlety rather than éclat, giving them poignancy for the modern audience the old conventions could never have found. In like fashion, her subject, theme, and dialogue all derive from what is unspoken, rather than what is. As in poetry, meaning lies between and behind the lines, and the play captures feelings and truths as elusive as the love it finally reveals. “Hope is the thing with feathers” The wishes of one generation colliding with the aspirations of the next are the inevitable clashes of human progress. In Alison’s House, each opposing desire holds a dream of personal fulfillment, and the resolution under the roof of the great poet is ultimately a hopeful one. Metropolitan embraces that spirit with our second production of the Season of Hope. -Jason A. Bocko and Alex Roe (and the poems of Emily Dickinson) The Provincetown Playhouse, Founded 1915 “A Chance to Work Out Their Ideas in Freedom” In the summer of 1915, Susan Glaspell and husband George Cram Cook helped found a summer theater on a Cape Cod wharf that would help begin America's little theater movement: THE PROVINCETOWN PLAYERS. The Players moved to 139 Macdougal Street in New York in the fall of 1916, where they devoted their work to support new playwrights and experiments in staging as an antidote to Broadway commercialism. By 1922 the company had produced over 90 new plays, including the first productions of Eugene O'Neill's early work, eleven of Glaspell's works, and those of more other women writers than any other theater of the time. The impact of the Players, and their eponymous playhouse located on MacDougal Street, resounds one-hundred years later. Favoring intense intimate dramas over the musical reviews, light comedies, and melodramas playing in the Broadway houses, the Provincetown Players gave decidedly Modernist playwrights a venue to practice their craft – or as Cook described it “a chance to work out their ideas in freedom”. Over its year lifetime the Playhouse presented plays by other influential Modernists, including Djuna Barnes, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Wallace Stevens. To Provincetown can be directly traced the rise to the Little Theater Movement in America, forebearer of the regional theaters we know today. First performed in 1930 at the Civic Repertory Theater on 14th Street, Alison’s House was met with an enthusiastic, but mixed reception. In the following year, the play transferred uptown to the Ritz Theater on 48th Street (now named the Walter Kerr theater). Many critics applauded the emotional intensity, and expressionist style – others (the famous Brooks Atkinson included), derided it for the same reasons. Regardless of taste, the quality of the work was enough to earn Glaspell the 1931 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Nearly eighty-five years later, it still provokes strong reactions in audiences being thrust into a family’s home while they deal with their most intimate secrets. As the Metropolitan Playhouse celebrates the hundredth anniversary of the Provincetown Players, we hope you join us in discovering Glaspell’s magnificent and intimate drama about one family’s history and its conflicting hopes. Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) Susan Glaspell is also the owner of a legacy that casts a long shadow over American theater. In her own lifetime, she was a well-known and best-selling author, and her one-act play Trifles is a staple of American anthologies. But after her death her work fell into relative obscurity. In the 70s her work received new attention and now she is recognized as an important feminist voice from the early century, though it is still rarely seen. The daughter of a hay farmer and school-teacher in rural Iowa, earned her BA at Drake University in 1899 and began work as a journalist for the Des Moines Daily News. She returned in 1901 to Davenport to concentrate on creative writing, and by 1911 had published two novels and stories in numerous magazines. In 1913, she married George Cram Cook, and to escape the gossip of their Mid Western community--he was already twice divorced, and a socialist who had given up a university career to truck farm--the two resettled among like-minded political and artistic spirits, including John Reed, in Greenwich Village. Glaspell and Cook grew disenchanted with the Broadway aspirations and infighting of fellow Players, and left to live a simple, rustic life in Greece in 1922. She returned to settle in Provincetown following Cook's death in 1924, and she continued writing, chiefly novels, though this was the period during which she produced Alison's House. She also served for a director of the Midwest Play Bureau for the WPA's Federal Theater Project in 1936, but resigned after two years. Returning again to Provincetown, she devoted her remaining years to writing fiction. Among her 15 plays are the one-acts Suppressed Desires (1915, with Cook), and Trifles (1916), and full-length plays Inheritors (1921, produced by Metropolitan in 2005), and The Verge (1921).


connect@metropolitanplayhouse.org