An Outbreak, Two Pandemics, and Karmic Healing
The Plays of Neith Boyce
REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION OF PROVINCETOWN ARTS PRESS
BY CAROL DeBOER-LANGWORTHY
MOST VISITORS TO PROVINCETOWN, often referred to as the "birthplace of American theater," have heard of the Provincetown Players, and associate the town with Nobel and four-time Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Eugene O'Neill. But few have heard of a woman whose name has been slowly rising from the sea of literary and theater scholarship to place her as the Ur-Mother of that collaborative repertory theater experiment.
It only took eighty-three years for Neith Boyce to be acknowledged as the founder of the Provincetown Players. In 2008, the Eugene O'Neill Society dedicated its annual meeting — held in Greenwich Village, of course — to Neith as the Provincetown Players' founder. Her one-act play, Constancy, had initiated the group on the veranda of her family's rental cottage at 621 Commercial Street on July 15, 1915. She was the author, producer, director, and leading lady in this Shavian discussion of love and faithfulness. Audience members understood it as a satire on the romance of reformer John Reed and cultural maven Mabel Dodge, as well as, possibly, a discussion of Neith's marriage to the radical journalist Hutchins Hapgood (1869-1944).
So who was she? Together with labor journalist Mary Heaton Vorse and novelist and playwright Susan Glaspell, Neith Boyce comprised a trio of women who, according to Vorse's biographer, "formed the nucleus that would bring the town its renown as a suburb for the [Greenwich] Villagers and as the birthplace of the Provincetown Players." An anarchist-feminist who established a writing career as a single woman in Greenwich Village in the 1890s, Neith insisted on using her birth name for publishing short stories and novels after marriage in 1899 to "Hutch," as he was known. In 1898, Hutch had written to his grandmother of his engagement to this successful young writer of realistic short stories who also, he said, "hopes soon to write a play."
Actually, she had been reluctant to marry at all. Relevant information here is that at age eight she survived a diphtheria outbreak in Milwaukee in 1880 that killed her four siblings in short order. This trauma scarred her emotionally and formed her stoic world view. She truly and sincerely feared that people she loved would die.
But she did marry, had four children, and by summer 1915 had three books out and dozens of short stories in high- and medium-brow publications. She also was probably better known as a serious writer than her husband, who — despite having published three books of reportage — was, at this point, an out-of-work newspaperman. Neith had just sold a short story, "Sand," that spring and was working on another.
And she was angry. Her play, The Faithful Lover, had been rejected by the Washington Sqware Players, an experimental group in New York's Greenwich Village. What really burned, probably, was that her sister-in-law, Emilie Bigelow Hapgood, was on the theater's board and likely had a hand in the decision. (Emilie went on to be a major patron and producer of Harlem Renaissance theater). Novelist Susan Glaspell and her writer husband, George Cram "Jig" Cook, also had a short play rejected by the Washington Square Players.
The two couples were among the "regulars" who always summered in Provincetown alongside Mary Heaton Vorse and her second husband, Joe O'Brien, as well as the fiction writer Wilbur Daniel Steele and his newish wife, the painter Margaret Steele.
Provincetown was especially full of artists, writers, and intellectuals that summer — people who usually would have decamped for Europe. There was a war on in Europe that threatened to spread. Just one such refugee was Robert Edmond Jones, a young theater set designer who would "set" Neith's play by creative placement of scarves over floor- and tablelamps and pillows on a couch. Others included Mabel Dodge, the subject of Neith's play. According to Hutch's later memoir, everybody in Provincetown was depressed about the war.
Earlier that spring of 1915, Mary herself had been trapped abroad, in England, after covering the Women's International Peace Conference at The Hague and touring European war sites. She returned to Provincetown with what would now be termed post-traumatic stress disorder. She felt unable to speak to her friends about the horrors she had seen. According to Mary's memoir, only the founding of the Provincetown Players relieved her ennui. Actually, many other claims for founding the group have only thickened those mists of time, especially as the experiment was based on anarchist principles articulated byJig Cook and Neith together. (But Jig wrote it down.) Many Players went on to become famous. Jig Cook lives on for his inspired direction and innovative theater productions.
Constancy was revolutionary in its expressionistic setting, its heroine who refused to mourn over a failed love affair, and realistic diction. Its success, along with that of Jig and Susan's Suppressed Desires, inspired the group to adapt Mary's abandoned fish house for a September encore. Over the next summer (1916), Neith's Winter's Night and Enemies (co-authored with Hutch, kinda) were performed at the Players' new site, the Wharf Theater in Provincetown. Her The Two Sons was performed as part of the Players' winter season 1916-17 at MacDougal Street in New York's Greenwich Village. Neith was on a roll as a playwright.
BUT IN FALL 1917 Neith and their four children decamped for a farm outside Norwich, Vermont. The marriage had hit a rocky spot. Neith had decided, it seems, to separate from Hutch for good. Or at least for a while. In a 1923 memoir about that time in Vermont, Neith recounts the year of October 1917 to October 1918 as "clear and perfect in every detail." The book negotiates the unusual ground of mother-son love as Neith supports Boyce ("Harry") Hapgood's dream of working as a cowboy before the Army would draft him in the fall of 1918. It is also quietly and determinedly antiwar — a dangerous political stance at the time. Alas, it all ends tragically. Hutch and Neith's firstborn son died of the Spanish Flu at seventeen in New Mexico, mere weeks before the Armistice on November 11. According to Neith's friend Florence Richardson-Rich of Wellfleet, "Neith never forgave herself for letting him go" to the West. The tragedy may have brought a full stop to her work with the Players. Neith and Hutch, grief-stricken, reconciled and never seriously separated again.
Neith handled it the only way she knew: by writing Harry: A Portrait. The book prompted a huge response of letters from mothers who had lost sons in WWI or to the disease. Novelist Abraham Cahan, Neith's old colleague from newspaper days in New York, said it was "so full of color, so subtle, so truly charming. A true tale like this is more valuable to literature than carloads of the best-paid fiction." Novelist Robert Herrick, with whom Neith had argued about the war, wrote the book's publisher in 1921: "I have long been of the opinion that the novel, in its conven tional form, is likely to become merged into imaginative biography and autobiography, and Mrs. Hapgood's picture of Harry carries out this theory. ... I like this much the best of Mrs. Hapgood's writing." A forecast of twenty-first-century creative nonfiction?
BROADWAY PROBABLY SEEMED a long way off. Neith and the family sojourned abroad in the first half of the 1920s, then bought a farm in New Hampshire. Then came the Depression, when Hutch lost much of his family money and Neith worked hard, largely unsuccessfully, to sell her short stories. Tastes had changed. In the winter of 1930, Neith and Hutch were living in Provincetown when someone working on behalf of British author H. G. Wells commissioned Neith to turn Wells' 1902 serialized short stories-turned novel, The Sea Lady, into a stage production. Wells probably approved of her work and politics and enlightened views on human sexual behavior. It seems to have been a deliberate and informed choice. For five years she worked to adapt this mermaid tale/meditation on young males' identity crises and the British class system.
She collapsed entire paragraphs of description into a character's single stage movement or use of a prop. The resulting play reads better than its overwritten magazine serial original. In 1935, Robert Edmond Jones — he who had "set" Constancy in Neith's home in 1915 and now famous in New York — began designing the set for The Sea Lady in a Broadway theater. Neith made several trips to the city to consult on the set and script.
At the last minute, however, Wells's agent pulled the rights; the gig was off. (Wells was in Hollywood at the time and possibly wanted it to be a movie.) This was probably a disappointing near miss for Neith, although no complaints exist in her papers. (Remember the stoicism?) She continued to draft plays and would go on to write and produce a pageant to mark the three hundredth anniversary of her Richmond, New Hampshire, town. And in 1938, her radio play about that year's hurricane — a metaphor for rising authoritarianism in Europe — was performed on Cape Radio.
Broadway's loss had probably felt like the end of Neith's playwriting hopes, although other draft scripts remain among her papers at Yale University. After her death in 1951, Neith's daughters, Miriam Hapgood DeWitt and Beatrix Hapgood Faust, both attempted to interest theater companies in The Sea Lady, without success. Neith's granddaughter, Neith Souza, continued the effort. So did I. No go.
However, early in the twenty-first century, writer David Hapgood (author of Year of the Pearl: The Life of a New York Repertory Company and Hutch's nephew) pressed a copy of the script on Alex Roe, artistic director of Metropolitan Playhouse in the East Village of New York City. Roe quickly rejected it, as their small company performed only American plays. The Sea Lady was deemed too British.
DEUS EX MACHINA: COVID-19. A mere one hundred years after the 1918 pandemic, a deadly virus struck the world again. Theaters closed by the dozens. Luckily, Alex Roe and company could pivot to online performances of plays, preferably one acts. Beginning with rudimentary but designed and playful readings of short plays on Zoom, Metropolitan Playhouse ran a series that aired weekly for fifteen months, compensated hundreds of artists, and reached thirty-five thousand viewers. Those early plays by the Provincetown Players fit the bill, including Hutch and Neith's Enemies, which ran Feb. 13-17, 2021, and her classic Winter's Night, March 2-25, 2021. Actors performed for their laptop cameras from their own sequestered homes, graphic artists transmitted their designs via cell phone, and directors combined these digital contributions to create virtual "stagings."
And it reminded Alex of that script for The Sea Lady; he hadn't thrown it away. Comparing it to the book version, he recognized that Neith, an American, had transformed a ponderous tale into a light satire about the British class system's constraints on males. Ergo, eligible for production by the fifty-seat playhouse. The Sea Lady was made available online December 11-15, 2021. As the pandemic eased, a live staged version premiered October 6-30, 2022. Neith would have loved it.
And it only took one global pandemic to cure another. Karma?