Plays

Susan Glaspell rewrote what theater could say about women. In this landmark collection, the 1916 masterpiece 'Trifles' unfolds as a deceptively simple murder investigation: a husband is dead, his wife stands accused, and the county attorney dismissively brings two county wives to the farmhouse to collect trifles. What unfolds is a quiet revolution. While men blunder through the crime scene looking for motive, these women piece together the truth from what the men deem worthless: a birdcage with a broken door, a quilt with strangling stitches, the cold remains of a preserves jar. Glaspell exposes the dangerous fiction that women's concerns are trivial, revealing instead that women see what men cannot or will not acknowledge. The collection also includes 'The Verge,' a three-act drama about a brilliant scientist whose desperate grasp for a breakthrough discovery mirrors her struggle against the walls of domestic expectation. These plays pulse with psychological intensity and crackling dialogue that feels overheard rather than written. Glaspell, a cofounder of the Provincetown Players and one of American theater's most essential pioneers, gives us theater that refuses to look away from women's intelligence, rage, and humanity.