Suppressed Desires

I was reading a book, The End of Comedy: The Sit-Com and the Comedic Tradition. Yes, it's a serious book about comedy. There's something funny about such books, and I tend to enjoy them.

Anyway, somewhat in passing he described Susan Glaspell as the playwright who determined the typical plot formulas for modern short plays, having given usTrifles (1916) as the exemplar of a short serious play, and Suppressed Desires (1915) as the exemplar of a short comic play.

I sat up straight in my chair, because I didn't really know anything about Glaspell, or Trifles, but I was pretty sure from his description of Suppressed Desires that I had stumbled across it, some months ago, in an old volume of short plays. And I had thought it was wonderful, and had mused over the fact that I had never heard of it before.

And here it was, singled out as a landmark, in a book from 1983.

Well, I don't really know theater the way theater majors do. I was an English major. Different worlds, even then. We just read a bunch of the same stuff, but the professors tackled it from different directions.

English professors always want
to set the play in its Age.

Theater professors always want
to put it - now! - on Stage.