Birds of a Feather: Two One-Act Plays

Susan Glaspell’s masterpiece Trifles can be found in countless anthologies of American drama, but it is rarely performed. Requiring an elaborate set and many props, it demands a lot from a theater company wishing to produce it. If seen these days, it is usually done by college groups, in which all the actors are in the same age range, which negates the tension between the brash, young county attorney and the older farm folks. The Out of the Box Theatre Company, which features actors over age fifty, advantageously put the years of its actors to good use in their production, and they got the better of the twenty-something prosecutor.Glaspell became one of Eugene O’Neill’s friends and was instrumental in arranging his first public performances, that of Bound East for Cardiff, staged in the summer of 1916 with the second set of performances by the newly formed Provincetown Players. The first bill contained Suppressed Desires by Glaspell and her husband, George Cram Cook, although the division of labor in this piece is unclear. There are those who think it was written by Glaspell and only the idea for the plot came from Cook. The third bill contained Trifles. She based the plot on her investigation fifteen years earlier when she was a reporter for the Des Moines Daily News assigned to the case of Margaret Hossack, who supposedly murdered her husband. Perhaps Glaspell wrote the play as expiation of her initial journalistic writings, in which she implies that Margaret was guilty. Margaret was initially found guilty, but the appellate court overturned that verdict on appeal, and the second trial ended with a hung jury. Prosecutors never retried the case, which remains open to this day. In their book Midnight Assassin, Patricia L. Bryan and Thomas Wolf assemble all available data about the murder and point out that several of the Hossacks’ ten children (unlike in the play, where the couple is childless) exhibited occasional violent outbursts, as did their father, which leads them to speculate that maybe one of them was the murderer. Unwilling to indict her offspring, Margaret did not share any knowledge of who the murderer was with the authorities but was telling the truth when she stated she was not the killer.The play varies significantly from the events of John Hossack’s murder, with Glaspell’s Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale openly concealing evidence from the investigating men and the men unable to understand the secret language of women. As such, the play is often considered a prototype for feminist drama, while not much emphasis is placed on its indictment of criminal justice. But it is also a superbly written play, with many plot twists and revelations, and the actors of the Out of the Box Theatre Company did a wonderful job. Of special note were Jeff Burchfield, as Lewis Hale, who did great work delivering the extensive monologue explaining what had happened when he first encountered Minnie Wright after her husband’s death, and Tish Brandt and Kim Yancey as Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, respectively. In their intent of purpose, they brought to mind the two conniving sisters of Arsenic and Old Lace. If there was a shortfall in the production, it would be with the lack of broken bottles in the Wright kitchen. There is much discussion of what would happen if the temperature got too cold in the house so that the bottles containing canned produce were to break. On an early twentieth-century farmstead before refrigeration, preserved produce was an integral part of food security. The loss of a number of jars, as Mrs. Wright worries, could compromise a family’s ability to weather the winter. The set for the Out of the Box Theatre production had several intact jars on display, but none of the broken ones described in the script.At only thirty minutes long, Trifles does not provide a full evening’s entertainment. Originally, the Provincetown Players did not combine the one acts on their programs because of thematic connections. The 1916 production of Trifles shared the bill with John Reed’s The Eternal Quadrangle, a play about a wealthy New York merchant and a semibiographical study of infidelity. David Edwards, director of Out of the Box Theatre production, chose to defy this tradition and programmed Glaspell’s play with the world premiere of Robert Karmon’s The Greenhouse, which shared with the older work a plot dealing with dead birds, hence the title Birds of a Feather given to the entire evening.Karmon’s play deals, in part, with the eating of ortolan buntings, birds considered a delicacy in France and eaten whole. However, rising demand has led to the species becoming endangered, so their consumption is now illegal. The play combines conflicting and even incorrect information about the birds (which are captured, not raised in greenhouses) with a blind date that ends with someone getting stabbed with a fork. Although described as a “surreal, dark comedy,” it had less in common with the plays of Eugene Ionesco than it did with Monty Python’s “Crunchy Frogs” sketch. The sophomoric and forced humor clashed with Glaspell’s subtle crescendo of revelation. The actors did the best they could with such limited material.Scenic designer Harlan Penn and costume designer Katherine Roberson created believable designs for both productions—realistic for Trifles and surrealistic for The Greenhouse. Lighting designer Stephen Cornelius did an adequate job with the limited resources available. The performance was followed by a talk-back, where the audience could share their thoughts and ask some of the performers and the director questions. The day I was there these included questions about what actors think about onstage when they are not actively acting and a discussion of quilt-making that quickly got off topic.Susan Glaspell wrote dozens of short stories, nine novels, and fifteen plays, with Alison’s House winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1930. Her dramatic works were highly praised both in this country, and even more so in England. Today, only Trifles remains as a remembrance of her output of dramatic and narrative writing, and we are lucky that the Out of the Box Theatre introduced a new audience to her best-known work.