The Outside premiered during the second New York Season of the Provincetown Players (1917-1918), and it is Glaspell's fifth play, the third she wrote on her own. The play includes all the stylistic elements that characterize Glaspell's oeuvre: marginal female protagonists, symbolic struggles between opposed forces, and experimentation with language. With this play Glaspell marked a stark disjunction towards a theatrical form that she had not displayed so overtly in her previous works, and which has made critics see in her a forerunner of Beckett's or Camus's absurdist plays (Bigsby 14, Sarlós 256).
As she had done in Trifles, Glaspell favoured again the one-act form, a general agreement among the Provincetown Players to use this form as the medium to test innovative aesthetic expressions which would lead to the creation of American native drama...
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Citation: Hernando-Real, Noelia. "The Outside: A Play in One Act". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 August 2009 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=15997, accessed 09 December 2025.]
