Trifles by Susan Glaspell

Summary below from Wikipedia

Trifles is a one-act play by Susan Glaspell. It was first performed by the Provincetown Players at the Wharf Theatre in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on August 8, 1916. In the original performance, Glaspell played the role of Mrs. Hale. Written during the first wave feminist movement, the play contrasts how women act in public and in private as well as how they perform in front of other women versus how they perform in front of men.

The play is loosely based on the murder of John Hossack, which Glaspell reported on while working as a journalist for the Des Moines Daily News. On December 2, 1900, Hossack’s wife, Margaret, reported to the police that an unknown person broke into their house and murdered John with an axe while she slept next to him. Margaret was arrested for the murder a few days later at John’s funeral.

Glaspell communicates the role that women were expected to play in late 19th century society and the harm that can come of it to women, as well as men. The feminist agenda of Trifles was made obvious, in order to portray the lives of all women who live oppressed under male domination.

A year after Trifles’ success, Glaspell turned the play into a short story, retitling it “A Jury of Her Peers”.  Glaspell used third-person, limited-omniscient narration to express the point of view of Martha Hale. “A Jury of Her Peers” adds irony by “highlighting the impossibility of women facing such a jury at a time when women were systematically denied the right to be jurors.”

Overtones by Alice Gerstenberg

Summary below from Stage Agent

Alice Gerstenberg’s most famous play, Overtones, gives voice to the suppressed yearnings of women in the early 20th century. Harriet and Margaret are poised, cultured society women. They say the right things, maintain proper etiquette, and do their best to ignore the nagging voices telling them what to do. Those nagging voices are Hetty and Maggie, their alter egos and primitive selves who throw decorum to the wind and desperately try to influence their cultured selves.

Overtones was heralded as representing a new formula in theater. Today it is still seen as a forerunner of later psychological drama by major playwrights, including Eugene O’Neill, who acknowledged its influence on his work. This same concern for the dramatic “representation” of the subconscious is obvious in Strange Interlude (1928) and in Days Without End (1932), both of which use masks to draw the conflict between the false outer self and the painfully honest subconscious self.

 

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