The American Moment trilogy

        Paterson Falls: It's 1913 in America's premiere city for manufacturing silk. The workers are on strike but the newspapers refuse to give it any coverage.  IWW organizers, led by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn team up with "Village intellectuals" including John Reed, Mabel Dodge and Margaret Sanger.  The result is "The Paterson Pageant"-- a show about the strike, staged for one night only at Madison Square Garden, directed by Reed, designed by Robert Edmund Jones and performed by a thousand silk workers who march all the way from Paterson to Manhattan.

        Mooncussers: Susan Glaspell and her husband, Jig Cook, team up with Neith Boyce and her husband, Hutchins Hapgood to create America's first theatre dedicated to the production of new American plays.  Starting in each other's homes in the summer of 1915, in Provincetown, Massachusetts, they move into an old fish shack on the wharf owned by labor writer, Mary Heaton Vorse.  When the undiscovered Eugene O'Neill rolls into town the following summer with a trunk full of scripts the Players know they're on to something big.

    The Art of Conversation: Salons are all the rage, from Gertrude Stein's in Paris to that of Mabel Dodge in New York City.  Sit in on these conversations or those at Heterodoxy or at the Liberal Club and one is likely to find Emma Goldman chatting anarchy with Isadora Duncan, dancing by Bessie Smith giving birth to the blues as Margaret Sanger agitates on behalf of family planning and Lillian Wald for settlement houses..
 

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On Theatre 1900 - 1910
On Theatre 1910 - 1920

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