Tyne Daly might be best known to a certain generation of audiences for her costarring role as down-to-earth cop and working mom Mary Beth Lacey in the mid-1980s television show Cagney and Lacey — for which she won four Emmy Awards for Best Lead Actress in a Drama Series — but her theatrical career is no less impressive.
Daley made her Broadway debut at the Helen Hayes Theater in 1967 and went on to appear in several well-regarded plays and musicals over the next five decades. She won a Tony Award for her lead role in the 1989 revival of Gypsy and two Tony nominations. She returns to those theatrical roots in two staged readings of Susan Glaspell’s 1916 one-act play Trifles at the Provincetown Arts Society on Sept. 1 and 2, and she will also read from the poetry of the late Tony Hoagland the following evening. All three events are fundraisers for the Sdociety’s operations and programming.
Trifles tells the story of the parallel investigations of a domestic murder case by a local sheriff and by two neighbors of the woman accused of killing her husband. Glaspell, one of the cofounders of the Provincetown Players, was inspired to write the play after reporting on a real-life murder trial for the Des Moines Daily News. In their exploration of the farmhouse where the alleged murder took place, the neighbors discover details that lead them to believe the suspect was the victim of domestic abuse, with a much more complex inner life and experience than the mere “trifles” the sheriff and his associates thought she was preoccupied with.
Regarded as an early landmark of American (and proto-feminist) theater, the play was originally produced at the theater on Lewis Wharf in Provincetown’s East End that social activist and writer Mary Heaton Vorse (1874-1966) lent to the fledgling company in its second season in Provincetown. The next year, the company moved to New York City. Glaspell later adapted the play as a short story, and it was further adapted as a screenplay for an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents in 1961, then as a chamber opera at Live Oak Theater in Berkeley, Calif. in 2010.
Daly will be reading the play with actor Gail Strickland. “Gail and I have acted together, and she’s a great friend,” says Daly. “I first came to the Outer Cape to spend time with her and her husband, and we’ve been hoping to find an opportunity to do something there ever since. I’ll be on the West Coast before I come to Provincetown. I’m excited to be able to see two oceans in the same week!”
Daly says that the staged readings, directed by Kevin Hourigan, will mirror the way Glaspell’s work originally debuted on Lewis Wharf. “We’ll be reading from the script with other actors,” says Daly. “It’s probably similar to the way the play was first produced.” Actors Scott Cunningham, Leland Fowler, and Joe MacDougal will read with Daly and Strickland, and the reading will be introduced by actor, writer, and social activist Celeste Lescene, a cofounder of the Trevor Project.
While Trifles is today considered to have strong feminist themes, Daly is careful to avoid categorizing it strictly in those terms — just as she has always resisted characterizing the television series for which she is best known. “I reject the idea of labels,” says Daly. “Before I did Cagney and Lacey, I spent most of my acting career playing victims. Most women on television back then were limited to comedies. For the network to make an hour-long show about two women was daring, and for me, to be able to play a hero was terrific and interesting. But I never wanted it to be just a ‘girl show.’ I wanted it to be for everyone.”
In addition to reading the Glaspell play, Daly will present an evening of readings from the poetry of Tony Hoagland on Sunday, Sept. 3. Hoagland, a former fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, wrote 11 volumes of poetry; one of them, What Narcissism Means to Me, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2003. He died in 2018.
“I told Gail that reading the Hoagland poetry would be my ‘fee’ for the play reading since I love his work so much,” says Daly. “I’m gone on the guy! I’ve read all of his collections over the past 15 years, and it’s a privilege to read his words out loud. As he once said, there’s such a difference between just reading poetry and being able to hear it. I’m grateful to [Hoagland’s wife] Kathleen Lee for giving us permission to share his work.”
Hoagland’s often humorous poetry has a personal significance for Daly. “Hoagland is wise and funny, which is a great combination,” she says. “He’s one of the funniest poets I’ve ever encountered. It filled up a place in me during these last three years of assault on the world. I’ve been thinking about a title for the reading, and I think I’m going to call it ‘Less Lonely,’ because that’s the way it makes me feel. I hope more people will become excited about his work, too.”
Daly, Strickland, Glaspell, and Hoagland
The event: Tyne Daly and Gail Strickland lead a staged reading of Susan Glaspell’s Trifles, and Daly reads from the poetry of Tony Hoagland
The time: Friday-Sunday, Sept. 1-3, 6 p.m.
The place: Provincetown Arts Society, 466 Commercial St.
The cost: $50 to $250 and up; see provincetownartssociety.com
