SOURCE: "On the Edge: The Plays of Susan Glaspell," in Modern Drama, Vol. XXXI, No. 1, March 1988, pp. 91-105.

In the following essay, Dymkowski investigates the "preoccupation with the limits of experience" displayed in Glaspell's plays.

Until recently, Susan Glaspell has been little more than "a footnote in the history of drama," remembered chiefly for her association with Eugene O'Neill and the Province-town Players; her contemporary reputation as one of the two most accomplished playwrights of twentieth-century America may come as a legitimate surprise even to serious students of dramatic history.¹ Her plays have rarely been performed by professional companies and, apart from the often-anthologized Trifles, have been unavailable in print² such marginalization Galspell's work is the most obvious way in which her drama can be said to be "on the edge." Its own preoccupation with the limits of experience is another.

Central to Glaspell's plays is a concern...