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R E George Cram “Jig” Cook A AN AMERICAN ORIGINAL HE T T By Susan Rand Brown HE A IN THIS CENTENNIAL YEAR of the Provincetown Players, professor of theater studies and Susan Glaspell biographer Linda Ben-Zvi, at a stage when retirement to her E home in Jaffa, Israel, overlooking the Mediterranean, would be a respectable R option, is instead climbing mountains in Delphi, Greece, in search of material illuminating the life of George Cram “Jig” Cook, Glaspell’s husband and argu- ably the key figure in the formation and direction of the Players themselves. R (above and below) Cook in a tavern in Delphi, 1922 E Just as she showed that Glaspell was much more than a walk-on To this end, she is preparing a cultural study of Cook and his figure in the narrative of Eugene O’Neill’s arrival on the Province- times, researching his writings on various social and political town stage, in her new book, Ben-Zvi hopes to provide a fuller issues, and the parallels between many of his ideas and those A context for evaluating the charismatic Cook, whose fervor and of central intellectuals of the time, such as Van Wyck Brooks, tenacity made the Players a reality, first in Provincetown in 1915 Randolph Bourne, and Max Eastman, who shared with Cook and then in Manhattan, where he moved the theater in 1916. Just a passion for Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, as well as an as Ben-Zvi, during her extensive research for her Glaspell biography avid interest in modern European literature and in many of the HE (Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times, Oxford University Press, 2005, “isms” that mattered to Cook’s generation. “Cook was not this T T awarded the Special Jury Prize from the American Library Associa- oddity, as he has often been described, but a figure very much HE tion), was concerned with preserving the legacy of this pioneering of his time,” Ben-Zvi said, though she adds that his originality feminist novelist and playwright, whose radical boldness in life sprang from his ability to meld a Midwestern heritage—drawn and art had been threatened by cultural erasure, so too her current from his antecedents and shaped by his bohemian mother, who concern is that Cook’s central role in the establishment of modern taught him a love for literature and beauty—with Native Amer- A American drama not be diminished or overlooked. ican myth and history, and his lifelong love of classical Greece. E R R E A HE T T HE A E R 140 PROVINCETOWN ARTS 2015 He finally visited Greece in 1922 and, two years importantly, for his own accomplishments and later, he tragically died there at the age of fifty. legacy to American culture.” A late-March Manhattan sun streaming onto In the preface to her Glaspell biography, Ben- her face, Linda Ben-Zvi, sitting on the edge of a Zvi opened the door for other researchers inter- chair in a midtown pub, describes “1915: The Cul- ested in exploring the life of Jig Cook, whom she tural Moment,” the June 1987 conference at the refers to as one of the great, larger-than-life char- Provincetown Inn that was to generate her own acters that America has produced. “He deserves to cultural moment, as Mary Heaton Vorse, Miriam be more than a footnote in Eugene O’Neill’s story,” Hapgood DeWitt, Joel O’Brien, and others shared Ben-Zvi wrote in 2005, “the surrogate father in firsthand memories of the Provincetown Players. decline, denied by the son in ascendancy—or even Then a theater specialist early in a teaching career, in Susan Glaspell’s life, as her greatest love and familiar with library research and about to begin partner in her greatest adventure, the Province- a book on Samuel Beckett (one of four she has town Players. In this book, I suggest the outlines authored and edited), Ben-Zvi became captivated of a study someone else may choose to write.” by Provincetown and the theater it inspired. It has been a full decade since the Glaspell bi- Suddenly, she was discovering a cast of charac- ography came out. My question to her was obvi- ters only one generation removed from the Players ous: has anyone accepted this invitation to follow themselves, willing to open scrapbooks—theater Cook where her research led, from the shores of the ephemera, including photographs—to share what Mississippi River in Davenport, Iowa, where both they remembered of Gene O’Neill, “Jig” Cook, Cook and Glaspell were born, to the mountains of Susan Glaspell, and the other left-wing bohemian Delphi, locus of his lifelong quest to become im- artists who trekked from Greenwich Village to mersed in the soil where ancient theater was born? Provincetown by boat and train during two piv- Ben-Zvi smiled broadly: not really. A year ago, otal summers, 1915–16. Here, the Players—first in when Ben-Zvi was looking online to see if anyone living rooms and then in a repurposed, two-story was writing about Cook, one of the few articles she fishing “shack” loaned by Mary Heaton Vorse and Glaspell and Cook visiting neighbors’ newborn goats in Delphi, spotted was a blog by an archivist at the American with their dog Tópuppy, fall 1923 now known as the Wharf Theatre—wrote plays, School of Classical Studies at Athens, who wrote built and painted sets, and performed for one an- very positive, nurturing relationship, which in some about Cook and his Delphi gravesite. This led to other. The primary source materials the Hapgood ways mirrored that of Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia their correspondence and Ben-Zvi’s invitation to daughters provided for her would go to the Be- O’Keeffe: his satisfaction derived from initially pro- present the school’s 2015 Annual Archivist Lec- inecke Library of Yale University to be catalogued; viding a venue in which she could display her art. ture, which she gave in January. “To this classical eventually they would be accessible to all scholars, Some critics see Cook as a negative force, casting a studies audience, my Cook research was modern though without the gift of personal transmission shadow on Glaspell’s life—separating her from the history,” she said with a grin. In fact, the lead ar- she had received. Players, dragging her against her will off to Greece. chivist and other archeologists asked Ben-Zvi to Not long after that first Provincetown visit, I think such a reading of their marriage is far too show them the various sites in Delphi where Cook during a National Endowment for the Humanities simplistic.” and Glaspell had lived. yearlong grant at the Library of Congress for a work Just as Ben-Zvi has been Glaspell’s biographer, “In Delphi I introduced them to Fanis Tsaka- on Beckett, she wandered the stacks, came across Glaspell too was a biographer, telling her husband’s los,” she remembered, “the grandson of the man novels and plays by Susan Glaspell, and became life story in The Road to the Temple, first published in who worked for Jig and Susan during their two aware of the extent of Glaspell’s writing—fifty short 1927, then reissued in 1942 and in a 2005 edition, years in Delphi, and made it possible for them to stories, nine novels, and fourteen plays, including which Ben-Zvi edited with an extensive introduction. experience life in the town and on Mount Parnas- her Pulitzer Prize–winning play Alison’s House, and “Now I am hoping to brush away some of the dust sus, as Cook had long dreamed.” her classic one-act Trifles. She also became aware from Glaspell’s biography,” Ben-Zvi told me. “It has What Ben-Zvi discovered was that Cook’s of Glaspell’s erasure from dramatic and literary to be remembered that it was she, his wife, an accom- passion for the theater still existed after he left history, except as the mythologized handmaiden plished fiction writer, who provided this record of Greenwich Village and the Provincetown Players, who brought Eugene O’Neill and the Provincetown his life, and also her own—hardly an objective view.” and was only replanted in Delphi, where he began group together, a meeting that resulted in the first Looking back at her own work, Ben-Zvi now sees the Delphi Players. He inspired the peasants of production of an O’Neill play: Bound East for Cardiff. some of the errors in perspective she too might have Parnassus to play roles in the epic story of their lit- Much work remains to be done in Glaspell made, such as seeing Glaspell and other women of tle-known history, which he discussed with them. studies and, especially, in Cook studies, Ben-Zvi her generation as victims of their time, needing to He also involved students from the University of maintains. The paradigm surrounding Glaspell’s be “saved” by later feminist scholars. “In truth,” Athens in the project. Cook was such a positive reputation, as a woman overshadowed by O’Neill Ben-Zvi said, “it was Glaspell who offered a model force in Greece that when he died the government as well as Cook, has not completely been put to for us: she went to college when few women did, allowed a stone from the ancient city to be used as rest; some researchers still prefer to frame her she sought a career and achieved great success, she his headstone, the only person to be so honored. within the context of being a victim, dominated was the breadwinner of the marriage, and, like the He was influential as well in inspiring another by the overbearing men in her life.