Susan Glaspell and Alison’s House

News of the 1931 Pulitzer Prize for drama elated the playwright, infuriated the theater critics, and surprised everyone. Alison’s House by Susan Glaspell beat out plays by such greats as Maxwell Anderson and the duo of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart.  Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) wrote plays, short stories, and novels, many featuring feminist themes. She and her husband, George Cram Cook, founded the Provincetown Players in 1915, seeking to revitalize American theater; Eugene O’Neill’s work debuted in the group’s Cape Cod fishing-shack-turned-theater. Originally from Davenport, Iowa, Glaspell began her career as a newspaper reporter and published her first novel in 1909. During the teens, she and Cook lived in Greenwich Village, part of its fabled bohemian enclave. In the 20s, the couple traveled to Greece, where Cook died in 1924. During the 1930s, Glaspell served as director of the Midwest bureau of the Federal Theater Project. She abandoned playwriting in her later years but continued to write novels.  Alison’s House premiered in 1930 at the off-Broadway Civic Repertory Theater. In the play, Glaspell, the second woman to win the drama prize, imagines the aftermath of the life of a poet modeled on Emily Dickinson: On the eve of 1900, the family of Alison Stanhope, long deceased, prepares to sell her Iowa home. The discovery of a cache of her unpublished love poetry reveals Alison in a new light, forcing the characters to confront their own choices and regrets. And they must decide what to do with the poems. 

The New York reviews were savage: “disappointing, wooden,” “lethargic,” “wordy, slight, and frequently dull.”[1] After the award was announced, New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson captured the views of his disgruntled peers: “Alison’s House is a play with a respectable theme. But to select it as the best play of the season is to show how meagerly the committee esteems the current American drama and the annual prize it helps bestow.”[2] The furor surrounding the award and growing dissatisfaction with the Pulitzer committee’s choices led to the founding of the New York Drama Critics Circle in 1935.  Contenders for the 1931 drama prize had included George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s Once in a Lifetime, a satire about Hollywood; Maxwell Anderson’s period drama Elizabeth the Queen; and Lynn Riggs’s Green Grow the Lilacs, the inspiration for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma. Compared with these lively offerings, Alison’s House must have seemed staid and long on talk. But bound to select a play “that shall best represent the educational value and power of the stage,”[3] the Pulitzer committee members defended their choice, praising the play’s native setting, its exploration of home and family life, and its treatment of Dickinson, still becoming known to the public in her centenary year. 

After a brief run uptown, the play disappeared from the New York stage. In the years following Glaspell’s death in 1948, her work languished in obscurity; if she was remembered at all, it was for helping to give O’Neill his start in theater. Yet Alison’s House has had its defenders and was finally revived in New York in 1999 and 2015 and in London in 2009 to favorable reviews.[4]  As a reader, I found the play surprisingly absorbing. Glaspell makes intangibles--memories and secrets, buried feelings, roads not taken, changing times and values—vivid and urgent. And as a reviewer of the 2015 production at the Metropolitan Playhouse in New York points out, in at least one respect the play is more relevant today than ever: “Alison’s House raises still-pertinent questions about legacy and public vs. private lives—if anything, in this era of Facebook and Twitter and omnipresent mass media, they’re more pertinent than then. This placid but eloquent revival spins them out admirably.”[5]    

[1] Quoted in J. Ellen Gainor, Susan Glaspell in context: American theater, culture, and politics 1915-48 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2001), 238. 

[2] J. Brooks Atkinson, “Pulitzer laurels: ‘Alison’s House’ as the most unsatisfactory dramatic award made during the past few years,” New York Times, May 10, 1931, p. xi. 

[3] Quoted in Gainor, 239. 

[4] See, e.g., J. Ellen Gainor, “Alison’s House,” Theatre Journal, 52:3 (Oct. 2000), 425-426; Victor Gluck, “Alison’s House,”; Marc Miller, “Alison’s House,”; Michael Billington, “Alison’s House,” The Guardian, Oct. 11, 2009.

[5] Miller, “Alison’s House.”