Plays

About this book

This volume contains four plays by Susan Glaspell. The most famous, Trifles, is set in a cold farmhouse kitchen, where a farmer has been found strangled in his bed and his wife is in jail. While the sheriff and the county attorney search the house for clues and laugh at the women's concern with 'trifles', the two women who came with them notice a half-finished quilt, a broken birdcage and a dead canary, understand what happened, and decide what to do with what they know. The volume also includes The Outside, The Verge and Inheritors.

Context and significance

Glaspell co-founded the Provincetown Players, the theatre that discovered Eugene O'Neill, and later won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Trifles, first performed in 1916, is now one of the most widely taught American plays, an early classic of feminist theatre. Its theme of a woman's hidden life recalls Kate Chopin's The Awakening.

About the author