The Verge

The Verge is a play by Susan Glaspell, first staged in 1921 and seldom produced since. This revival is a partnership between Fiasco Theater, a New York ensemble company that began with a production of Cymbeline in 2009, and The Public Theater. Jessie Austrian, who helped found Fiasco and helps lead it, directs.

The play centers on Claire Archer, a botanist determined to breed a new kind of plant. Her husband, her lover and a close confidant all end up at her greenhouse during a snowstorm, and her experiments turn into a larger question: whether getting past the limits placed on her means wrecking them. The tone moves between farce, philosophical argument and feminist critique, and it does not stay inside the rules of realistic theater.

As of October 2026, Miriam Silverman plays Claire. Silverman is a Tony Award winner: her work in The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window took Best Featured Actress in a Play in 2023. Amara Leonard joins five members of Fiasco's company in the cast: Emily Young, Paco Tolson, Devin E. Haqq, Paul L. Coffey and Noah Brody.

In Glaspell's script, the play runs three acts. The first takes place in Claire's greenhouse, which doubles as a botanical laboratory. She has sent the house's heat to her plants so one new flower can bloom. The men in her life gather, the morning turns into farce, and her teenage daughter, Elizabeth, arrives and is sent away.

The second act moves to a tower where Claire retreats. Her sister scolds her, and her husband, Harry, has invited a neurologist, Dr. Emmons, to dinner to treat her. Tom and Dick, the two men closest to her, each press her in different ways, and what she wants from either of them comes into the open. The third act returns to the greenhouse, and the comedy gives way to something much darker.

Glaspell completed The Verge in 1921, and it ranks among the first expressionist plays written in the United States. Instead of realistic rooms and everyday speech, the script bends its settings and its language to show what is happening inside Claire: the sets are distorted to mirror her state of mind, and her lines grow more poetic and fragmented as she becomes more agitated. Farce and symbolism sit side by side.

The Provincetown Players were founded by Glaspell and George Cram Cook, her husband. Her one-act Trifles dates from 1916, and her 1930 play Alison's House won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The Verge was published in 1922.

The production is staged in LuEsther Hall at The Public Theater. Seven actors share nine roles: one actor plays both Anthony and Dr. Emmons, and another plays both Adalaide and Hattie.

The Provincetown Players gave the play its premiere in New York on November 14, 1921, and a London staging followed in 1925. Later revivals include a 1996 production directed by Auriol Smith at London's Orange Tree Theatre, in Richmond, and a 2009 production by the Incubator Arts Project in New York, directed by Alice Reagan.

The path to this production began in 2023. Expand the Canon, which promotes classic plays by women, sent the script to Austrian, and Fiasco then held a reading of the play with the group in 2023-24.