THIRST AND OTHER ONE ACT PLAYS. Louise Bryant's Copy
Boston: Gorham Press, (1914). First Edition. hardcover. First book by this multiple Pulitzer Prize winner, perhaps the greatest playwright of the American theater, containing 5 short plays: THIRST, THE WEB, WARNINGS, FOG, and RECKLESSNESS. Atkinson AI-1-I: 1000 copies printed, financed by his father, the actor James O'Neill. This is Louise Bryant's copy with her ownership SIGNATURE dated 1916 on the front endpaper. The book is also SIGNED by O'Neill on the front pastedown with the unattributed first 5-line stanza of Ernest Dowson's poem "Exchanges" in O'Neill's hand: "'All that I had I brought,/Little enough I know,/A poor rhyme roughly wrought,/A rose to match thy snow;/All that I had I brought.'/Gene O'Neill -- T.Y.A." Additionally the book is SIGNED on the list of characters for the title play by each of the actors: George Cram Cook as A Gentleman, Louise Bryant as A Dancer, and O'Neill as A West Indian Mulatto Sailor. Below the cast list Bryant has written: "As played by the/Provincetown Players/Provincetown, Mass/Summer 1916." Bryant has made a similar notation on the cast list page for FOG: "Played by the Provincetown/Players--Playwrights Theatre/New York City--Winter 1917." THIRST, the second of O'Neill's plays to be produced, has a number of lines crossed out in pencil with some words added by Bryant who obviously used this text in the production of the play. The work of the Provincetown Players in the summer of 1916, with its production of THIRST and before that O'Neill's BOUND EAST FOR CARDIFF, along with plays by Bryant, John Reed, and others, is sometimes cited as the beginning of modern theater in the United States. An exceptional copy of this important book. Very Good, lacking the scarce dustwrapper. Item #017500
George Cram Cook, husband of author Susan Glaspell, was the founder of the Provincetown Players. At the time of the production of THIRST, O'Neill was having a brief affair with Bryant, who was in a relationship with journalist John Reed whom she would marry that fall. Their love triangle was famously fictionalized in the film REDS with Warren Beatty as Reed, Diane Keaton as Bryant, and Jack Nicholson as O'Neill. Supposedly encouraged by Bryant, O'Neill took on the most stage time of his entire career performing in this play. Both THIRST and FOG have shipwrecks as plot devices, quite likely influenced by the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 as well as O'Neill's experience keeping watch in the crow's nest of the U.S.S. Philadelphia on the same route taken by the Titanic.
Price: $60,000.00