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| | EPC/Douglas Messerli on Djuna Barnes 2 |
 | | Until the final moment of the play, indeed, there is no action: it is all a dialogue of possession, a war of words between the true inheritors of the father's love and the woman who has stolen and squandered that love (she is now engaged to a Supreme Court judge). |
 | | As Barnes biographer Andrew Field has suggested of Barnes' comedy of 1918, Madame Collects Herself, the play has less to do with influences of the time, particularly those of her fellow playwrights of the Provincetown group Eugene O'Neill, Susan Glaspell, and Edna St. Vincent Millay than it does with Eugene Ionesco. |
 | | Accordingly, most of Barnes' early writing for theater, composed at the same time as the fiction she herself described as juvenilia, must be understood as experimentations in which she was working out in dramatic terms the theatrical influences of the day. |
| www.writing.upenn.edu /pepc/authors/messerli/essays/messerli_barnes_roots.html (882 words) |
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