Story summary
Trama e riassunto di Opere teatrali: Trifles, L'esterno, Il limite, Gli eredi
- 8 min di lettura
- 10 parts
- Audio a breve
Two farm women find a birdcage in a dead man's kitchen while the men search for a motive upstairs.
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Opere teatrali: Trifles, L'esterno, Il limite, Gli eredi in breve
Riassunto: 8 min di lettura
- Tempo di lettura
- Circa 4 h3 h 10 min fast, 4 h 45 min slow
- Durata
- 56.700 parole
- Livello nella biblioteca
- Medio longer sentences, everyday words
Reading time at 238 words a minute (fast 300, slow 200). Quanto tempo ci vuole per leggere i classici · Aggiornato
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Opere teatrali: Trifles, L'esterno, Il limite, Gli eredi in short
Across four plays, Glaspell asks one question in different rooms. Who gets to say what counts? Trifles gives the answer to women who notice small things. The Outside gives it to a woman silent for twenty years.
What Opere teatrali: Trifles, L'esterno, Il limite, Gli eredi is about
Two women stand in a cold farm kitchen while the men tramp upstairs hunting for a motive. The women notice a loaf outside the breadbox, a crooked line of stitching and an empty birdcage. The men see nothing worth a glance.
That quiet scene opens this collection by Susan Glaspell, who wrote these four plays around the First World War; most were first staged by the Provincetown Players, the company she helped found. You get the heart of each play, and the endings stay fresh for you.
A chi è rivolto. You will love these plays if you enjoy short, sharp drama, strong women at center stage, quiet mysteries, and ordinary people facing a question of conscience.
The story in 10 parts
Key idea 1 · free to read
Trifles begins in a cold abandoned kitchen
Trifles takes place in one room, the kitchen of John Wright's farm. John Wright lies dead upstairs, strangled by a rope in his own bed. His wife Minnie is in the county jail. The sheriff, the county attorney and a neighbor come back to search the house.
The county attorney wants a motive, something that shows anger or a sudden feeling. The neighbor, Lewis Hale, tells how he found Mrs Wright rocking in a chair and pleating her apron. She told him in a flat voice that her husband was dead of a rope around his neck.
The men treat the kitchen as a mess to walk through. They sneer at the dirty towel and scoff that she frets over preserves while held for murder. Hale says women are used to worrying about trifles. The men call everything in the room a trifle and so cannot see it. What a house keeps in its small things may be the whole story.
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The women read the kitchen like a letter
Left alone, Mrs Hale and Mrs Peters begin to notice things.
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A buried station and two women hiding in it
The Outside begins in an old life-saving station on the outer shore of Cape Cod.
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Allie Mayo breaks twenty years of silence
When the men step out, Allie Mayo carries in the coffee.
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Claire runs a laboratory disguised as a greenhouse
The Verge opens in the dark, with a buzzer sounding and one plant glowing in a shaft of light.
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Locked doors, a daughter, and a torn vine
Glass stands between people all through the first act.
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Claire pushes against love, family and words
Act two moves to a tower that curves and then breaks into jagged lines.
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A pioneer decides to give away his hill
Inheritors opens on the Fourth of July in 1879, in a Midwest farmhouse near the Mississippi.
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By 1920 the college bends to money and fear
Act two jumps to October 1920, the fortieth anniversary of Morton College.
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Madeline weighs family love against her conscience
Act four returns to the Morton farmhouse a week later, on Madeline's twenty-first birthday.
Read all 10 key ideas now
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Characters, plot and themes
Main characters
- Mrs Hale A farm wife who remembers Minnie Foster as a singer and grows determined to understand what her old neighbor's silence means.
- Mrs Peters The sheriff's wife, torn between the law she is married to and her sympathy for a woman she barely knows.
- Allie Mayo A Provincetown woman who has kept silent for twenty years since her husband was lost at sea, and who finds her voice.
- Mrs Patrick A New York woman who buries herself in an abandoned life-saving station and wants her house, and her grief, to herself.
- Claire Archer A plant breeder who wants to create what has never existed and to escape every form that confines her.
- Tom Edgeworthy Claire's closest friend, who loves her apartness and plans to leave for India, believing distance is the way to keep her.
- Silas Morton A pioneer farmer who never finished school and decides to give his hill to found a college for the children of the cornfields.
- Madeline Morton Silas's granddaughter, a student who defies her uncle, her aunt and her college to stand up for strangers.
How it ends (spoiler)
In Trifles, the women hide the dead bird and keep the motive from the men. In The Outside, Mrs Patrick begins to say the phrase meeting the Outside with new wonder. In The Verge, Claire kills Tom, the one person she loves, and goes out of her mind singing a hymn. In Inheritors, Madeline gives up her family's protection and leaves with Emil Johnson to face the law.
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Domande su Opere teatrali: Trifles, L'esterno, Il limite, Gli eredi
What are Trifles, The Outside, The Verge and Inheritors about?
Trifles is about women who read a murder scene better than the men. The Outside is about a silent woman and a grieving one on the Cape Cod dunes. The Verge is about a plant breeder who seeks otherness. Inheritors is about a college and a family conscience.
What does the title Trifles mean in Susan Glaspell's play?
The title echoes the men's belief that women's concerns are small things. The clues themselves, such as bread, stitches and a birdcage, are small and ordinary yet vital to understanding what happened in the Wright house.
Is Trifles based on a true story?
Glaspell wrote Trifles after reporting on a murder trial in Iowa as a young journalist. The play is her own invention, but it borrows the farm setting and the question of how a lonely wife's life was seen by neighbors.
What is the Edge Vine in The Verge?
The Edge Vine is a plant Claire Archer has bred to break away from the form of its kind. It stands for her wish to reach beyond the usual, and for her fear that what she creates may turn back.
Are these plays easy to follow when you read or hear them?
Yes, the speech is plain and the scenes are short. Trifles and The Outside each unfold in a single room, and the stage directions help picture the setting. The Verge and Inheritors build clearly from act to act.
Cita questa edizione
Glaspell, Susan. Plays: Trifles, The Outside, The Verge, Inheritors. Library of Alexandria, 2026, libraryofalexandria.com/products/plays-trifles-the-outside-the-verge-inheritors.
Glaspell, S. (2026). Plays: Trifles, The Outside, The Verge, Inheritors. Library of Alexandria. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/plays-trifles-the-outside-the-verge-inheritors
Glaspell, Susan. Plays: Trifles, The Outside, The Verge, Inheritors. Library of Alexandria, 2026. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/plays-trifles-the-outside-the-verge-inheritors.
@book{glaspell2026plays,
author = {Glaspell, Susan},
title = {Plays: Trifles, The Outside, The Verge, Inheritors},
publisher = {Library of Alexandria},
year = {2026},
url = {https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/plays-trifles-the-outside-the-verge-inheritors}
}
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