Rock Island’s Genesius Guild Resumes Audio Productions
Fans of the Genesius Guild will not need to wait until next summer to enjoy new productions. The Guild resumed their audio production series with a doubleheader of Fog by Eugene O’Neill and Enemies by Hutchins Hapgood and Neith Boyce. You can listen to the audio production by visiting the Genesius Guild website (www.genesius.org) or by searching for “Genesius Guild Radio Productions” on your favorite podcast platform.
This production includes the Genesius Guild’s first foray into the work of Eugene O’Neill. O’Neill was the single most famous and influential figure to emerge from the Provincetown Players – an influential American theater group founded in 1915 by Davenport, Iowa natives Susan Glaspell and George Cram Cook. His work continued to explore themes and structures from the Greek tradition (“Mourning Becomes Electra”; “Desire Under the Elms”), even as he became one of the most important American dramatists of all time.
Fog is a script by Eugene O’Neill first produced in January 1917. This script, unjustly neglected beside some of the playwrights more well known works, combines O’Neill’s recurring fascination with the sea, including a setting especially reminiscent of the dangerous Atlantic crossing that had proved disastrous for the Titanic less than five years before the play was performed — with a lively debate on practical life and poetry, and a supernatural eeriness.
The second half of the audio production is a shorter script entitled “Enemies” first staged in the summer of 1916. It was written by those hospitable friends of Jig and Susan, Hutchins Hapgood and Neith Boyce, whose house was the first Provincetown Players’ performance space, and who were Midwesterners just like Jig and Susan — Hutchins from Illinois and Neith from Indiana. Each of them reportedly wrote the lines for one of the two speaking parts, He and She respectively, in this collaborative, argumentative exploration of the meaning of love, marriage, and fidelity in the modern world.
The Genesius Guild is a community theatre organization located in the Quad Cities specializing in free classical drama. Founded in 1956, the group performs Greek drama, Greek comedy, the works of Shakespeare, and other classical authors every weekend throughout the summer.
For more information, please visit www.genesius.org
