A table, a desk covered with magazines and loose sheets of paper, posters calling for revolution. These are the set pieces for Susan Glaspell’s one-act play The People, which tells the story of a “radical and poor” newspaper and its staff as they stumble toward a more hopeful future. It’s a comedy. It’s a manifesto. And in 2025, over a hundred years since the play’s opening night in 1918, it’s equally unintelligible and surprisingly relevant.
The play begins with editor-in-chief Edward Wills returning from a cross-country fundraising trip with no money and no faith in the paper’s future. Despite the newspaper’s title, The People: A Journal of the Social Revolution, Ed doesn’t think its articles have contributed to any sort of societal transformation. “Now and then…we have a story that gets a rise out of a few people,” he says, “but—we don’t change anything.”
Ed’s skepticism is challenged when three travelers, each from different corners of the United States, arrive at the office. They’ve all read issues of The People and were inspired by Ed’s words. Ultimately, Ed declares that he’s found “something to go on with,” and The People lives to see another day. Curtains, lights, applause.
Fundamentally, The People is a play about the value of the written word in the bleakest of times. Its characters argue, banter, and question the purpose of their work, all while making heartfelt declarations about truth and being alive. They speak in simple, beautiful sentences. “We are living now,” one character reads from the newspaper. “No one can tell us we shall live again. This is our little while. This is our chance.”
I’d say The People is a fairly easy read—it’s fewer than 5,000 words, the language is modern, and thanks to the public domain, you can find it for free online—but there are some ways that its meaning is lost on a 21st century reader. That’s because The People isn’t just a play—it’s Susan Glaspell’s satirization of the 1910s arts scene, in what essentially amounts to an elaborate inside joke.
Glaspell was a founding member of the Provincetown Players, an experimental theater group formed in 1915. Many of the Players were also associated with The Masses, a socialist magazine dedicated to “the interests of the working people.” The Masses was led by editor Max Eastman, who gave frequent lecture tours in California to fundraise for the paper and whose biggest fear, according to his biographer Christoph Irmscher, was that “he might only be talking to himself.”
If that sounds familiar, it’s because Ed Wills is directly based on Eastman. The People is an unsubtle parody of The Masses, down to the nearly identical titles of the two newspapers. Ed isn’t the only character with a real-life counterpart—sarcastic associate editor Oscar Tripp is a stand-in for The Masses’ Floyd Dell, and his fellow writer Sara is likely based on prolific labor journalist Mary Heaton Vorse. In fact, nearly every character in The People can be connected to a member of The Masses. Glaspell puts her contemporaries under the spotlight’s exacting gaze, revealing their disagreements and doubts with a level-handed mix of blunt honesty and earnest appreciation for their work. Her satire of The Masses is keen-eyed and meticulous, and all in all, the play is an impressive commentary on the intellectual world of the 1910s.
It’s also completely incomprehensible to a modern reader. The first time I read The People, I had never heard of The Masses or the Provincetown Players, let alone any of their various members parodied in the play. Without the background knowledge, The People comes across as somewhat surrealist, with moments of odd specificity and jokes that don’t quite land. I find the play’s history fascinating—the precision of Glaspell’s analogies, the way much of it has been lost to time. It makes me wonder what other bits of meaning we’re missing, subtle references or sly jokes that only Glaspell’s original audience, sitting in a crowded little room in 1917, would have understood.
I’ve always believed in the power of language—words can save lives, can transform, can change minds and unlock boxes—so when I first read The People, I didn’t particularly connect with Ed’s cynical perspective. I liked the play for its evocative speeches and witty dialogue, but I never really considered its overarching questions about what it means to be a writer and whether or not the written word can truly impact the world around us.
That changed during my first semester at Brown. I took two English classes and a literary arts seminar on poetry, which meant I was spending a lot of time thinking about language and writing. At first, I felt happy, delighted, whimsical, splendid. I would read on the Main Green or sit by a window annotating papers with my favorite pen, all the while thinking, Look at me! I’m so literary! I’m creative and artistic and brilliant! Hooray!
But as the semester wore on, I started to doubt whether writing was really all that important. This transformation had several causes, including a) realizing that I was, objectively, doing less work than my classmates in STEM fields, b) learning about the intangibility and subjectivity of language in class, c) the natural experience of growing up and questioning previous beliefs, and d) the fear I felt about the future of the world following the November election, along with the knowledge that writing a poem about it wouldn’t make much of a difference.
All of these factors put me in a state of mind quite similar to Ed’s. In one of his monologues, he says there’s “something rather pathetic” about the staff of the paper, calling out to a crowd that never calls back, making grand statements about social change without actually changing anything. That was exactly how I felt—why should I write a poem about climate anxiety or an essay on equal rights instead of going out and doing something that would tangibly contribute to these causes? What was the point?
Over winter break, I found a response to these questions in The People. The show ends with one of the travelers, an unnamed woman from Idaho, explaining to Ed how she felt after reading his article in the paper. “You made us want something we didn’t have,” she says. “I had thoughts not like any thoughts I’d ever had before—your words like a spring breaking through the dry country of my mind.”
This, I think, is what The People is trying to tell its audience about the written word. Yes, it’s intangible. Yes, it’s confusing and abstract and subjective. Yes, being a writer means feeling like no one is listening—but what if someone is? Maybe writing can’t patch the ozone layer or make walls fall down, but what it can do is reach out to other people, make them think, make them feel, make them want a better world.
The People ends on a hopeful note, and I believe Glaspell intended for the play to inspire that same hope in its audience. What she can’t have imagined, though, is that the play would still be inspiring hope over a hundred years in the future. The People, as an enduring text, demonstrates its own ideas about the power of language as a vehicle for human connection and the creation of feeling.
To put it simply, The People is the reason I’m still writing. It gives me hope that the words I write will find and transform someone, make them feel something new and think differently about our world. If you’ve ever doubted the purpose of writing, the purpose of art, the purpose of standing up and saying what you believe, then I hope Susan Glaspell and I have given you a little more faith in the value of your words. After all—we are living now. Let’s find something to go on with.
