The Spark
The Pilgrims first landed in Provincetown before moving on to settle Plymouth. They deemed the hook of land useless for there were dunes of sand for as far as the eye could see – it had not the makings for sustainable farming. What did catch their attention was the abundance of rich fishing grounds that were quickly claimed as their own. The winds were soon filled with pirate air and the tiny cape tip became HELLTOWN to its Puritan rulers.
Come 1906, P-Town had evolved into a bustling Portugese fishing and whaling community when Mary Heaton Vorse and the mister settled the family on the center’s main drag, Commercial Street. The town had been a hideaway for artists and writers for quite some time but she had in effect established a beachhead for the pending Greenwich Village Invasion.
Mary Heaton Vorse was born into a high-end family in the Western Massachusetts town of Amherst. She lived a privileged upbringing, trotting around Europe where she was exposed to a potpourri of culture and languages. She first dreamt of becoming a painter but soon traded in her brush for a pen. Vorse blossomed as a writer and became enmeshed in the social issues of the day as an ardent supporter and entrenched soldier for Sufragettes and the labor movement alike.
The first of the Greenwich legions arrived in the summer of 1914 when patroness of the arts, Mabel Dodge landed with her latest boy-toy journalist John Reed. Reed had more in common with Vorse in that they both were contributing writers to the lefty magazine The Masses, covering unrest surrounding labor strikes that had deteriorated into violence at places like Lawrence, Massachusetts and Paterson, New Jersey. Reed had just returned from Mexico as an embedded reporter for four months with Pancho Villa and made his mark as a bonafide war correspondent. His Provincetown days were spent organizing his thoughts into his book Insurgent Mexico and acting as a quasi-advisor to President Woodrow Wilson on events unfolding south of the border. Their Provincetown nights were enchanted evenings in a silken tent in the Race Point dunes. A great war broke out that same summer in Europe.
As the weather turned warm in 1915, it became apparent that Provincetown was slowly becoming a vortex for bohemian NYC circles. Many of those who called P-Town home that summer were active participants of Mabel Dodge’s New York 23 Fifth Avenue salon, where people would congregate and conversate about politics and art and the current events that were unfolding around them that would shape their lives.
Husband and wife writing team of Hutchins Hapgood and Neith Boyce set up camp in the 600 block of Commercial Street (now owned by artist Anne Packard). Charades could easily have been a way to pass the warm Cape nights away but Neith opted instead to treat the partygoers to her freshly penned play Constancy. Her captive audience of friends were ushered out to the deck of the rented Bissell Cottage where she unveiled the reading. As simple and strange it may seem, this serendipitous moment on July 15, 1915, is considered to be the birth of modern American theatre. The result was infectuous and downright inspirational. Another couple, George Cram Cook and Susan Glaspell, jumped into the fray and debuted their Suppressed Desires to their audience of friends soon after.
Anyone who has ever spent a summer in Provincetown knows how quickly news travels down Commercial Street and before long there were many there among them who were bummed out that they missed out on all the fun. They decided to recreate the excitement in a slightly larger venue than a deck and went to work to transform a tiny fish shack at the end of Lewis’ Wharf, the main pier in Provincetown, into a performance space.
1915 was dress rehearsal for what was to become in 1916. Over the winter months they officially dubbed themselves, The Provincetown Players.
NEXT: CH 2: FREE LOVE, POLITE ADULTRY
