Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein’s Avant-Garde Theatre (review)

Sarah Bay-Cheng’s Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein’s Avant-Garde Theatre begins again the ongoing debate about the simultaneously praised and derided American writer/theorist’s place in the dramatic canon. The success of Bay-Cheng’s project of reclaiming Gertrude Stein’s dramatic work rises and falls on the writer’s conclusion that Stein’s plays are not only innovative with dramatic form but ultimately worthy of the stage, rather than simply chamber pieces that are better read than seen. In other words, Bay-Cheng asks and attempts to answer the question, “Do the plays play?” This “stageability” (20) then serves to forcibly allow the plays to address the relevant political, social, and aesthetic questions of the avant-garde not only for Stein’s own time but also in the contemporary stage work of theatre artists such as Susan Lori-Parks, Richard Foreman, and Robert Wilson. Mama Dada is a necessary and engaging view into Stein’s always-emerging, forever-receding shadow on the landscape of contemporary nontraditional playwriting; however, Bay-Cheng’s study can also be an occasionally infuriating series of absences for the reader more interested in the stagecraft or actual performance reconstruction surrounding Stein’s work.

After beginning with Stein’s fixture within and emergence from the early movements of the avant-garde, experimental cinema, and the germination of what would become queer theory, Bay-Cheng spends the majority of Mama Dada in the critical analysis of and the engagement with Stein’s dramatic texts and theatrical productions as they were realized and received in her lifetime. These analyses include two of Stein’s most celebrated works, “Four Saints in Three Acts” and “Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights,” along with her monumental dramatic coda “The Mother of Us All.” Mama Dada concludes with an overview of Stein’s widespread but still underappreciated influence on the American avant-garde of the present day. The book’s structure fixes Stein in a continuum; Bay-Cheng playfully refers to it as a “continuous present” throughout the text, where Stein is always a presence but not always seen, even in her own lifetime.

Chapter 5, “Atom and Eve: Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights,” illuminates what is both rewarding and lacking in Mama Dada. Bay-Cheng traces Stein’s modern retelling of the Faust legend from its incubation within the novel that would become Ida, A Novel (1941) into a fully realized stage production. Using both the photos from the program and Stein’s journal notes from her viewing of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in 1938, Bay-Cheng shows Stein’s inspiration for bringing the Faustus story to the stage: “Thus, it is not difficult, based on the conclusion of Don Giovanni—in which the title character descends into hell—and the program’s references to previous productions of Faustian operas, to see how Stein began combining the elements that would eventually become Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights” (76). The ingenious use of the primary documents shows a clear demonstration of Stein’s understanding of the necessity for theatrically realizing her rumination on the classic tale of a soul sold for enlightenment. Bay-Cheng’s analysis of Stein’s journal notes and Don Giovanni’s program then sets the stage for her in-depth examination of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights as a text with no past or future but only a present contained in a technological nightmare that is debilitating in its blinding brilliance.

However, the insight of the analysis of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights ends before arriving into its actual production. For all the time Mama Dada spends deconstructing theatrical texts, it does not give anywhere near equal weight to the reconstruction of the plays as actual theatrical events. Stein’s work, as Bay-Cheng rightfully asserts, calls attention to the “continuous present” of existence where nothing is as it previously was or will be. Of all the arts, theatre, with its inherent ephemerality, makes more visible the impossibility of actual...