An Arabic translation of Susan Glaspell's play, "Trifles"

This is an Arabic translation of “Trifles”, a famous play by prominent American playwright Susan Glaspell (1876-1948). Glaspell was one of the founders of the Playwright’s Theatre, formerly recognized as the Provincetown Players in the United States of America. She wrote ten novels, twenty plays, and more than forty short stories. “Trifles” is a one-act play written in 1916.2 It is considered to be one of Susan Glaspell’s major works. “Trifles” is a play that is frequently anthologized in American literature textbooks. The play was based on the murder case of the sixty-year-old farmer, John Hossack, which was covered widely by Susan Glaspell while she was working as a journalist with the Des Moines Daily News immediately after her graduation from Drake University. Accordingly, “Trifles” presents the murder of an oppressive husband by his emotionally abused wife. It is an attempt to re-address the John Hossack case from the point of view of women who might not have a similar viewpoint of the nature of marital disagreement and domestic unhappiness.3 The murder happened in a period where women had insufficient protection from domestic abuse, and had not yet obtained the right to vote. The main characters of the play are: 1- The Sheriff, Mr. Henry Peters; 2- Mrs. Peters(wife of the Sheriff); 3- Mr. Lewis Hale (a neighbour of Mr. and Mrs. Wright); 4- Mrs. Hale (wife of Mr. Hale); and 5- The County Attorney, Mr. George Henderson. The off-stage characters are: 1- Mr. John Write (the victim); 2-Mrs. Minnie Write (the victim’s wife); 3- Frank (Deputy Sheriff); 4- Harry (a helper of Mr.Lewis Hale); 5- Dr. Lloyd (the coroner). The play addressed the life of Mrs. Wright who becameenraged and took the life of her abusive and violent husband after he killed her bird. The motivefor murder was the killing of the canary because it represented freedom for her. Mrs. Wright, theprotagonist, lived through a series of emotions, such as rage, shock, lack of feeling, rejection,and deep sadness, mainly because the loss of her bird was sudden, surprising and unforeseen.4 She considered the death of her bird as a great calamity, as she lost something extremely crucialin her life. Susan Glaspell chose the title of the play from a line stated by one of the characters inthe play, Mr. Lewis Hale, when he says: “Well, women are used to worrying about trifles.” The title demonstrates irony when Mrs. Minnie Wright seemed to be more concerned about triflesthan she is about being under arrest for murder. This English play, “Trifles,” was chosen to betranslated into Arabic because of its significance and association to the Arab culture. For thesake of wide readability, it was translated into Modern Standard Arabic (formal Arabic), as it isquite the same in all Arab countries.

The Evolution of American Dramatic Realism

Realism in American drama has proved its resiliency from its inception at the end of the nineteenth century to its transformation into modern theater in the twentieth century. This chapter delineates the evolution of American realistic drama from the influence of European theater and its adaptation by American artists such as James A. Herne and Rachel Crothers. Flexible enough to admit the expressionistic techniques crafted by Susan Glaspell and Eugene O’Neill and leading to the “subjective realism” of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, realism has provided a wide foundation for subsequent playwrights such as David Mamet, August Wilson, and Sam Shepard to experiment with its form and language.

Humor, ironía y actualidad en la dramaturgia de Susan Glaspell

Reseña crítica de Nieves Alberola Crespo, Susan Glaspell y los Provincetown Players. Laboratorio de emociones (1915-1917), ISBN: 9788491340829, Valencia, Publicaciones de la Universidad de Valencia, 2017, 180 pp.

The underestimated power of woman In Susan Glaspell’s Trifle

This paper examines the theme of feminism through focusing on the female bonding as a means of gaining power .In this paper I’ll prove that the America dramatist Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) makes a feminist leap as she portrays her female characters with an ample cunning to secretly and humbly triumph over male prejudice. She challenged those who believed that the United States offered freedom and equality by demonstrating that women were not treated equally since they were excluded from participating in the justice system except as defendants the underestimated power of woman in Susan Glaspell’s Trifles (1916) which is written in the early twentieth century but it transcends time periods and cultures.

Drama

This chapter pushes against the notion that Eva Palmer Sikelianos's work in Greece was disconnected from her non-Greek past and indifferent to “archaeological problems.” Digging deep into her papers and other sources dating between 1903 and 1940, the chapter pieces together Eva's dialogue with artists from Isadora Duncan to H. D. to George Cram Cook and Susan Glaspell to Angelos Sikelianos, who were all familiar with archaeological problems but standing at an oblique angle to them as they thought about how to stage the ancient Greek chorus. This transatlantic genealogy allows reflection on how creative work happening near ruins, yet outside the formal discipline of archaeology, responds to the place, takes on the feel of archaeological discoveries, and generates further rounds of imaginative reworking. The same genealogy brings into view how Eva's efforts to revive the tragic chorus, having transformed Isadora's experiments, traveled across the Atlantic to inform the work of Ted Shawn.