THE FLOW OF INSPIRATION OR HOW THE DESIRE OF ONE PLAYWRIGHT AFFECTS ANOTHER IN AMERICAN DRAMA
Panel Chair:
Bárbara Ozieblo (Universidad de Málaga)
Juan Ponce de Leon, Eugene O'Neill's protagonist of The Fountain (first performed in 1925), distracted by desire for youth, sought the fountain of eternal life in the New Land. When O'Neill wrote The Fountain he was responding to the challenge of George Cram Cook's The Spring (1921) in which inter-racial, inter-generational communication bubbles forth thanks to the agency of the waters of an age-old spring. O'Neill, in private letters, revealed that he too hoped to show "each soul connect[ing] with every other." Cook and Susan Glaspell had co-founded the Provincetown Players to give American playwrights a stage on which to experiment and the three undoubtedly influenced one another as they drunk the dregs of the famous Provincetown Punch (in the face of Prohibition) and interchanged thoughts and ideas on the sand dunes of Provincetown. Inspiration flew freely between them, enhancing their creative powers and enriching the American Drama. In 1943, recalling their earlier optimism, Glaspell wrote the still unpublished and unperformed Springs Eternal in which inter-generational understanding and communication springs from the deepest illusions and dreams held by human beings.
This panel will look at the ways in which inspiration and influence have always flown, like water, like wine, between American playwrights, renewing the American Drama by providing subtle channels that connect dreams, illusions, and ambitions and allow new forms to develop that provoke audiences to action.
Suggested topics:
- Connections between playwrights: how inspiration/influence flows to transform/renew the medium of theater.
- How one theme can inspire a variety of treatments as it flows through time.
- Traditional groupings of playwrights - the deltas of the many streams of American drama - can highlight or obscure connections.
- The creation of new theatrical forms; the source, the stream, the rapids, the cataracts, the rivulets, the river, the floods . . . creating many pronged deltas that flow into an ocean of theatrical experience.
- How the desire to reach an audience inspires the playwright to renew the forms of drama: an examination of the devices used to inundate the spectator with new emotions and so provoke audience reaction to the issues presented by a playwright.