SOURCE: "Susan Glaspell's Contributions to Contemporary Women Playwrights," in Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights, edited by Enoch Brater, Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 147-66.

Ben-Zvi assesses the ways that Glaspell's work paved the way for modern feminist writers, arguing that while Glaspell's "particular experiments may at first glance seem removed from those of women writing in modern and postmodern modes of the sixties, seventies, and eighties … they are in fact part of the same ongoing search for dramatic means to depict female experience. "

The name Susan Glaspell is followed in her biographical sketches by some of the most illustrious credentials in all of American theater history: cofounder of the Provincetown Players, the seminal American theater company; prodigious playwright, who contributed eleven plays to the Province-town theater in its seven years of existence, surpassed only by Eugene O'Neill, who wrote fourteen under the aegis of the group;¹ talented actress...