Provincetown, Massachusetts, had become a popular summer outpost for numerous artists and writers, bohemian residents from Greenwich Village, New York.
The plays were funded in part by a subscription campaign in which Cook described the aim of the group: “to give American playwrights a chance to work out their ideas in freedom.
In September 1916 before leaving Massachusetts, the group met and, led by Cook and John Reed, formally organized "The Provincetown Players," voting to produce a season in New York City.
[7] The Players was founded as an amateur group, and initially did not allow critics to attend to review its plays, hoping to protect its experimental nature.
Finally they voted to allow critics tickets to performances, even though some founding members considered this means of evaluation to be the criteria of commercial theater, and therefore a violation of the mission of The Players.
Alexander Woollcott in The New York Times said that The Emperor Jones was an "extraordinarily striking and dramatic study of panic fear.” O’Neill's play “reinforces the impression that for strength and originality he has no rival among American writers for the stage.”[2] Cook used the production of The Emperor Jones to advocate for a striking scenic innovation, spending over 500 dollars on the set alone[8] – the construction of a dome in the Playhouse modeled on the scenic element used in art theaters in Europe.
The dome (kuppelhorizont) used a “combination of vertical and horizontal curvatures” as a reflective surface to represent the horizon and create a greater sense of depth than a flat cyclorama.
[8] After the attention The Emperor Jones received, along with a Broadway transfer of the play, some members of the Players began to see their highest goal as gaining commercial and critical success.
As a result of the growing pressure to succeed in commercial terms, and with no new playwrights coming to them to be developed, Cook and Glaspell asked to incorporate the "Provincetown Players" so as to protect the name.
They left in 1922 to travel to Greece after O'Neill fired Cook as the director of his play The Hairy Ape and they felt he was using the Players as a try-out for its Broadway run without apology.
Though Cook wrote his subscribers promising a season beginning in October 1923, he and Glaspell remained in Greece, and the original Provincetown Players did not produce again.
When Jig Cook died in Greece January 1924, Susan Glaspell could not prevent creation of a new producing organization, but she fought to protect the name "The Provincetown Players" from the new partnership.
[3] Prominent among these playwrights were Glaspell (who later won a Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1931 for her play, Alison's House); Boyce, Djuna Barnes, Louise Bryant, Rita Wellman, Mary Carolyn Davies, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.
[13] The anti-commercial impulse, emphasis on artistic expression, and collective decision-making of the Provincetown Players were manifestations of the bohemian spirit of Greenwich Village of the 1910s.
Mabel Dodge, who hosted the most celebrated literary salon of the period, was the former lover of founding member of the Players Jack Reed (actor).
[14][15] Djuna Barnes, Theodore Dreiser, Susan Glaspell, Robert Edmond Jones, James Light, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eugene O’Neill, John Reed, Wallace Stevens, Marjory Lacey-Barker, Cleon Throckmorton, and Charles Demuth.