It's just Beauty that's calling me, the beauty of the far off and unknown, the need of the freedom of great wide spaces, the joy of wandering on and on—in quest of the secret which is hidden over there, beyond the horizon.

Eugene O'Neill
Beyond the Horizon

Eugene O'Neill, September 5, 1933.
Creative Americans: Portraits by Van Vechten, 1932-1964

The experimental Playwrights' Theater opened its first New York season on November 3, 1916, at 139 MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. The premiere featured three short plays: The Game, by journalist and social activist Louise Bryant; King Arthur's Socks, a comedy by Floyd Dell; and Bound East for Cardiff, a one-act play by then unknown playwright Eugene O'Neill.

The November 3 production marked the New York debut of one the most influential American artists of the twentieth century. O'Neill, who wrote more than twenty full-length plays over the course of the next two decades, is credited with transforming American theater into a literary medium which, in its artistry, rivaled the best in American fiction and painting. He won four Pulitzer Prizes for his plays and remains the only American playwright to have received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

During the summer of 1916, a group of young artists and writers vacationing at the seaside resort of Provincetown, Massachusetts had organized the Playwrights' Theater, adapting a building on a wharf as a stage. The Provincetown players wrote and performed their own plays and designed and constructed all stage sets and costumes themselves.

The Boston Post headlined its September 16, 1916 review of the new experimental theater "Many Literary Lights Among Provincetown Players." These "lights" included Mary Heaton Vorse, William Daniel Steele, Susan Glaspell, Louise Bryant, Neith Boyce, and Hutchins Hapgood.

Captain Jack's Wharf,
formerly a fish pier, now a tourist colony mainly inhabited by "artists,"
Provincetown, Massachusetts,
Edwin Rosskam, photographer, August 1940.
FSA/OWI Photographs, 1935-1945

The Provincetowners thought longingly and talked ambitiously of their theater on the wharf and of the native American drama they were trying to fan into existence. And during that time, packed among O'Neill's scarcity of belongings, lay "Bound East for Cardiff", a script…no producer would mount—a script that awaited adoption by a group of idealistic artists.

O'Neill: The Complete Biography,
by Arthur and Barbara Gelb.

Eugene O'Neill, whose father had been a popular touring actor, performed the role of ship's second mate for the premiere of his play, Bound East for Cardiff. In this walk-on part, the playwright had one spoken line. In a Sunday, August 13, 1916 article about the Provincetown Players in the Boston Globe, journalist A. J. Philpot wrote O'Neill's first review:

Many people will remember James O'Neill who played "Monte Cristo." He had a son—Eugene O'Neill—who knocked about the world in tramp steamers…and saw life "in the raw," and thought much about it…He is one of the Players, and he has written some little plays which have made a very deep impression on those who have seen them produced here.

When the summer season closed, the Players relocated to a small space in Greenwich Village where the Playwrights' Theater produced all of O'Neill's short works between 1916 and 1920 helping him develop a small reputation by the time his first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, opened on Broadway on February 2, 1920.

Provincetown, by F. K. Rogers, 1877.
Map Collections (1500-Present)

And thus it comes about that the spot where the Pilgrims first landed is the spot where one may look for the "last word" in literature and art.

Boston Post,
September 10, 1916

Provincetown, Massachusetts, site of the first landing of the "Pilgrims" had been rejected by the Plymouth Colonists who found the area unsuitable for farming. After signing the Mayflower Compact on board the ship, the colonists moved further along the coast of Cape Cod to the famous landing site at Plymouth Rock.

The fishing village of Provincetown developed during the 19th century. In 1899, Charles Hawthorne established an "open-air" school for art on the dunes along the town's shore. In the years following, the village continued to attract many aspiring artists and writers who found inspiration and material for their art in the shifting light and color of the seaside and the mystery of the horizon.

Sand Dunes, Provincetown, Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
American Landscape and Architectural Design, 1850-1920

• Search on Provincetown in the collection FSA/OWI Photographs, 1935-1945 to find many photographs of the Provincetown, Massachusetts summer scene of the 1930s and 1940s which include fisherman, tourists, and artists.
• Search on Provincetown in other American Memory photographic collections and map collections to find many other images and maps of the Provincetown area.
• Harry Kemp spent a year with the Provincetown Players in 1916 and opened his own Poetry Theater in Greenwich Village in 1921. He shared his musings and his poetry with writer May Swenson of the Federal Writers' Project in the American Life Histories, 1936-1940 interview, "Tramp Poet."
• Search on Eugene O'Neill in Creative Americans: Portraits by Van Vechten, 1932-1964 to find more photographs of the artist and the village where his plays were first produced. Browse the Occupational Index to find photographs of other prominent twentieth-century playwrights, poets, and actors.

Eugene O'Neill and Carlotta Monterey O'Neill,
September 5, 1933.
Creative Americans: Portraits by Van Vechten