by Jan Lisa Huttner
It Was a Dark and Stormy Night. . .
by Jan Lisa Huttner
An exceptionally dry summer ended abruptly on Wednesday, September 28, the
night of Linda Ben-Zvi's visit to Chicago. The temperature dropped thirty degrees
in a matter of hours, the heavens opened, and traffic all across the metro area
slowed to a crawl. So the crowd that greeted Tel Aviv University Professor Ben-Zvi
was small, but as Spencer Tracy once said about Katherine Hepburn, every bit
was "choice." Two of the three college sponsors were represented,
DePaul University and Roosevelt University, as were all three of the WITASWAN
partners, AAUW-Illinois (the American Association of University Women), CAWHC
(the Chicago Area Women's History Council), and, of course, IWPA. Unfortunately
the sponsor from Columbia College Chicago had to send her regrets at the last
minute.
After all the umbrellas were safely stashed, Professor Ben-Zvi began a fascinating
overview of Susan Glaspell's long career, punctuated by dramatic readings from
three of her plays. Glaspell was born into one of the pioneering families that
founded Davenport, Iowa, in the early 1800s, and though she traveled widely
throughout her life, she never lost her Midwestern values. In one of her final
plays, The Inheritors, she returns to her grandmother's kitchen, circa
1879, in search of the moral authority to challenge the deportation of immigrants
after World War I.
Dean Corrin, Chair of the Theatre Studies Department at The Theatre School of
DePaul University, brought four of his students to read from texts provided
by Professor Ben-Zvi. In addition to three scenes from The Inheritors, they
also performed scenes from Suppressed Desires, one of Glaspell's earliest
plays, and from Trifles, the play for which she is best-known today.
Suppressed Desires is set in Greenwich Village when it was the Mecca for
American artists who wanted to be known as "avant garde." (Anyone
who's seen Warren Beatty's film Reds will immediately connect to this time and
place.) In her introduction, Professor Ben-Zvi reminded us that Sigmund Freud
made his first trip to America in 1911, so the concepts in Suppressed Desires
were very new and controversial. I had the good fortune of listening to an early
rehearsal during which the four DePaul students were clearly confused about
the material. Professor Ben-Zvi provided the clue with great gentleness: "It's
meant to be a comedy." Thus liberated, the students played for laughs and
were well rewarded. Looking back, it's amazing now that Glaspell could have
been so astute about psychoanalysis so early in Freud's own career.
Trifles, on the other hand, is a serious and sober work. Glaspell wrote
it as a stage play first, then rewrote it a few years later as a novella called
A Jury of Her Peers. For those of us who know A Jury of Her Peers
either in print form or through Sally Heckel's Oscar-nominated film version,
the evolution of certain key scenes is fascinating.
Sincere thanks to Dean Corrin, as well as Shannon Altland, Joe Goldammer, Vergia
Siovhan Norris, and Austin Talley, the four DePaul students, for making September
28th such a memorable evening. And best wishes always to Professor Linda Ben-Zvi
as she continues her book tour.
Jan Lisa Huttner, IWPA's Program Vice President, is the managing editor of FILMS FOR TWO: The Online Guide for Busy Couples (www.films42.com). She has given presentations all across Illinois on Sally Heckel's 1980 film adaptation of A Jury of Her Peers.