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“The Game” by Louise Bryant premiered July 28, 1916, on Lewis Wharf. Marguerite Zorach designed the backdrop, an abstract rendering of Provincetown Harbor. The sketch for the set design was used as a playbill logo for the Provincetown Players (left to right, John Reed, William Zorach, Helene Freeman, Judith Lewis). |
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1916: Biggest art colony in the world at Provincetown
Laurel Guadazno
“The summer found a lot of us at Provincetown — surely the biggest summer that most of us have lived through. Jack Reed, being as I say a most successful journalist and war correspondent, had taken a good sized house for the summer and had invited several of us to be his summer guests,” wrote Marsden Hartley in his autobiography “Somehow a Past.” The summer of 1916 was, according to all accounts, a brilliant time in Provincetown. The group who would establish the Provincetown Players was all here: John Reed, Louise Bryant, Susan Glaspell and George Cram Cook, as well as Hutchins and Neith Hapgood. Eugene O’Neill, now the best known of the group, arrived in town as an unknown playwright with a packet of one-act plays. “Eugene O’Neill had come to Provincetown and was living in a little shack on the beach beyond the town with the anarchists, Terry and young Becky Edleson. Three beachcombers!” recalled William Zorach in his autobiography “Art Is My Life.”
But it wasn’t just writers and playwrights who were flocking to town that summer. Provincetown also attracted a large crowd of artists. With travel to Europe curtailed by World War I, artists and writers were all looking for someplace where they might find the social and intellectual support they had found abroad. In August 1916, The Boston Globe ran the now famous headline, “Biggest art colony in the world at Provincetown.”
There was a lively interchange of ideas among the artists and the playwrights. Marsden Hartley remembered, “The best of a good time was had by all — for we were all congenial in our various ways.”
The relationship that developed between Marguerite and William Zorach and the Provincetown Players exemplifies the type of collaboration that existed. They had decided when they were married that they would spend every summer in the country. In 1916 they rented a fish loft in Provincetown. Zorach remembers that Marguerite shocked Provincetown by wheeling their young son Tessim, “up and down Main Street and letting him play on the beach naked. She said it was much easier to wash a baby than to wash his clothes, and besides he was handsome to look at and draw.”
For his part, William enjoyed getting up before sunrise and going out to the weirs. He painted the fishermen pulling their nets and the boats floating in the harbor. Together they became involved with the Provincetown Players. He wrote, “That summer we became fascinated by the Provincetown Players. A group of unknown playwrights were producing their plays on an old wharf. They asked Marguerite and me if we would design and paint scenery for them. It was their first experience with the theatre and ours too, but we had no hesitation. We were full of ideas and eager to use them.”
Zorach remembers that although the Players put on plays by O’Neill, he never designed a set for them because O’Neill insisted that everything be real. If the play called for a stove, it had to be a real stove, not one painted by an artist. Probably the best known set the Zorachs designed was one for a play written by Louise Bryant called “The Game.” Zorach remembered it wasn’t much of a play but that Louise wanted to produce it and asked them to design the set because she thought “an exciting stage set might put it over.” Louse Bryant told the couple they could do whatever they liked and even asked Zorach to act in the play. “We were delighted with the opportunity to put on a play and ruthlessly turned an English morality play into a sort of Egyptian pantomime. The backdrop was a decorative and abstract pattern of the sea, trees, the moon, and the moon path in the water designed by Marguerite. The Provincetown Players used this as a decoration in front of the theater in New York for years after we were no longer with them. The costumes were slight and abstract and the movements were worked out in a flat plane in pantomime. It made a hit. When the Provincetown Players went to New York, this was the first play they put on.”
The Zorachs worked with the Provincetown Players for four years, but gradually William began to resent the time it took from his painting. He wrote, “It was hard to give up the fascination of the theater but one has only one life and one cannot divide it between two gods. I found myself torn between art and the Provincetown Players and I began to feel terribly frustrated. The theater had been a good education, but art was my medium of expression. I had to make a decision. I gave up the theater.”
William Zorach went on to become a well-known sculptor. Probably his best known works are “The Spirit of the Dance,” a sculpture he did for Radio City Music Hall and his heroic sculpture of Benjamin Franklin, for the old Post Office Department building in Washington, D.C.
As for the summer of 1916, Louise Bryant wrote, “Never were so many in America who wrote or painted or acted ever thrown together in the same little place.”
[Laurel Guadazno is curator of education for the Pilgrim Monument & Provincetown Museum.]
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Aug 18th, 2005