Commercial success eroded the collective spirit of experimentation on which the Provincetown Players had been formed. As a result of the growing pressure to succeed in commercial terms, and with no new playwrights coming to them to be developed, Cook and Glaspell asked to incorporate the "Provincetown Players" so as to protect the name. They left in 1922 to travel to Greece after O'Neill fired Cook as the director of his play "The Hairy Ape" and they felt he was using the Players as a try-out for its Broadway run without apology. Though the 1921-22 season finished without the public knowing that Cook and Glaspell had left, the Players announced a suspension of their 1922-23 season. Though Cook wrote his subscribers promising a season beginning in October 1923, he and Glaspell remained in Greece, and the original Provincetown Players did not produce again.