City Garage presents
The Gertrude Stein Project
An evening celebrating the writing of Gertrude Stein
November 9 — December 16, 2001
Directed by Frederíque Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe Jr.
Assistant Director Paul M. Rubenstein
Cast:
Ford Austin One
Maureen Byrnes Woman
Irene Casarez Flutist
David E. Frank Two
Katharina Lejona Four
Jed Low Man
Kathryn Sheer Three
Crew:
Set, Sound, Lighting, and Media Design Charles A. Duncombe, Jr.
Assistant Director Paul M. Rubenstein
Costume Design Mimi Dore
Light/Sound Operator Michael Connelly
Stage Managers Rye Acosta, Tara Tobin, Kristine Kelly
Photography Rick Pickman
Time and Place:
1920s, Gertrude Stein’s Paris salon
The play runs approximately 75 minutes
and is performed without an intermission.
About The Texts
Gertrude Stein’s singular approach to writing plays was inspired in large part by the Cubists. Excited by what she saw in their canvases, she aimed to bring their fragmented, kaleidoscopic perspective to language in order to more truthfully tease out the essence of life’s experiences. She rejected traditional modes of narrative and character development, preferring instead to create her own dramaturgy based on transcendent moments of illumination and grounded in a playful and highly inventive use of language.
In 1935, in the wake of the successes of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Four Saints in Three Acts, Gertrude Stein returned to America for an equally successful lecture tour. The following is excerpted from the essay Plays, which grew out of addresses delivered on that tour.
The thing that is fundamental about plays is that the scene as depicted on the stage is more often than not one might say it is almost always in syncopated time in relation to the emotion of anybody in the audience.
What this says is this.
Your sensation as one in the audience in relation to the play played before you your sensation I say your emotion concerning that play is always either behind or ahead of the play at which you are looking and to which you are listening. So your emotion as a member of the audience is never going on at the same time as the action of the play.
This thing the fact that your emotional time as an audience is not the same as the emotional time of the play is what makes one endlessly troubled about a play, because not only is there a thing to know as to why this is so but also there is a thing to know why perhaps it does not need to he so....
...the fundamental difference between excitement in real life and on the stage, in real life it culminates in a sense of completion whether an exciting act or an exciting emotion has been done or not, and on the stage the exciting climax is a relief. And the memory of the two things is different....
...So then once again what does the theatre do and how does it do it.
What happens on the stage and how and how does one feel about it. That is the thing to know, to know and to tell it as so.
Is the thing seen or the thing heard the thing that makes most of its impression upon you at the theatre. How much has the hearing to do with it and how little. Does the thing heard replace the thing seen. Does it help or does it interfere with it.
And when you are taking part in something really happening that is exciting, how is it. Does the thing seen or does the thing heard effect you and effect you at the same time or in the same degree or does it not. Can you wait to hear or can you wait to see and which excites you the most. And what has either one to do with the completion of the excitement when the excitement is a real excitement that is excited by something really happening. And then little by little does the hearing replace the seeing or does the seeing replace the hearing. Do they go together or do they not. And when the exciting something in which you have taken part arrives at its completion does the hearing replace the seeing or does it not. Does the seeing replace the hearing or does it not. Or do they both go on together.
All this is very important, and important for me and important, just important. It has of course a great deal to do with the theatre a great great deal...
...And so I began to write these plays. And the idea in What Happened, A Play was to express this without telling what happened, in short to make a play the essence of what happened.
When the inimitable Stein declared that, "the most serious thinking about writing in the twentieth century has been done by a woman," she was, of course, speaking about herself.
About The Author
Gertrude Stein was born near Pittsburgh in 1874 and grew up in Oakland, California. She moved to Paris in 1902, where she was among the first collectors of such artists as Picasso and Matisse. In 1909 Stein began living with Alice B. Toklas, who was to be her lifelong companion. During the 1920s the two women hosted a salon that attracted painters, writers, composers, dancers, and particularly the Cubists and American expatriates such as Earnest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom Stein famously tagged as belonging to, "a lost generation." Stein was the acknowledged doyenne of this community of artists, which also included the likes of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, the latter of whom would later incorporate many of her dramturguical ideas into his own writing. Stein once declared, "Einstein was the creative philosophic mind of the century, and I have been the creative literary mind of the century." In 1933, Stein achieved the only commercial success of her career with the publication of her memoir, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. A year later, avant-garde composer Virgil Thomson turned her play Four Saints in Three Acts into a critically and popularly acclaimed opera. She became a legend in Paris, particularly during the German occupation (1940-1944), and after the city’s liberation Stein’s home was once again a locus for young Americans. Gertrude Stein died in 1946.
program notes by Paul M. Rubenstein