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And that by casting himself in the silent offstage role he was going to find out. m. The play presents Mrs. Rowland, who directs all her comments onstage to her husband, Alfred, who is offstage in the bedroom. The unhappy Mrs. Rowland is described as shrewish by most critics as she spends the entire play berating her sensitive poet husband whose only success seems to be wooing other women. She reveals that pregnancy forced their marriage and she bemoans the extent to which they have fallen from their former selves.

All this has radical implications for how O’Neill and American theater have been defined in theater history. A Bum G ame Al l Around: The Misery o f the Mi sbeg ot ten In the initial stage directions for The Web, O’Neill underscores a central crux behind the philosophical and ideological argument in American theater. Describing the boarding house on the Lower East Side where Rose lives, he uses the word “squalid,” which has important definitions for the Progressive Era. First, “squalid” defines those who are “morally degraded,” a definition that speaks to the notion of poverty as a reflection of differences in values between the upper and lower classes.

This was further encouraged by his 1912 viewing of the Irish Players from the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, who presented an Irish identity in the plays written by their countrymen (this company inspired O’Neill as well). It was Cook’s belief, one that was tested over his years with the original Provincetown Players, that only a truly amateur group could provide the environment necessary for the experimentation needed to develop an American voice in theatre. ” In the second section of resolutions, it is clear that from the beginning that the group wanted the author of the plays they presented to have full authority of its production.