VIDEOS: East Lynne Theatre Co. Presents THE TALES OF THE VICTORIANS

East Lynne Theater Co. presents TALES OF THE VICTORIANS: a scene from TRIFLES by Susan Glaspell

The year is 1916 in an old farmhouse. Performers for this staged reading are James Rana, Lee O'Connor, and Gayle Stahlhuth, who were all in the same house in Cape May, NJ, where the Equity professional East Lynne Theater Company is located, when everyone was ordered to stay home in March 2020.

Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) was born and raised on a farm in Davenport, Iowa. By age 18 she was a journalist, and by 20 had her own column. As a reporter for "The Des Moines Daily News," she covered murder cases and the state legislature, but quit the paper to write fiction full-time.

Her stories appeared in "Harper's" and "The Ladies' Home Journal." She moved to Chicago and in 1909, her first book was published, "The Glory and the Conquered." It became a "New York Times" best-seller. Financially secure, she toured Europe for a year. In 1915. with her husband, George Cram Cook, she co-founded the first modern American theater company, The Provincetown Players.

Though Provincetown Players was a critical success, Glaspell had to continue writing and selling short stories to pay the bills. After Cook died in Greece in 1924, she returned to Provincetown, MA to write his biography, "The Road to the Temple." She continued to write plays, and garnered the Pulitzer Prize for "Allison's House" in 1931. Most of her nine novels, fourteen plays and over fifty short stories are set in Iowa.