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Modernism/Modernity 7.3 (2000) 447-469



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The Centrality of Race to the Modernist Aesthetics of Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts

Barbara Webb *


The 1934 opera Four Saints in Three Acts, composed by Virgil Thomson with a libretto by Gertrude Stein, is a landmark in the history of American performance. Broadway had never before showcased a work in which words served the usual function of music, not telling a story or communicating meaning in a traditional fashion, but primarily sounding. The casting was also revolutionary, as the entirely black cast performed a work not written in dialect and unrelated to traditional themes of black life. This intersection in 1934 of Steinian modernism and black performance is more than an interesting episode in the history of theatre. It is a prime moment in which to examine a modernist text transferred to the stage, and the transformation of its poetics of "nonidentity" when the communicative medium is a performing body inscribed with social history. An examination of the Stein/Thomson project uncovers a tension between a high modernist strategy that rejected linearity and history and a visible physical racial identity that was, by definition, the cumulative effect of historical cultural narrative(s). On one hand, the high modernist project of Stein and others can be characterized as unrelated to the historical realism, concerned not with referentiality, but with the artistic capacity of syntax. 1 On the other hand, race is intrinsically a historical product and its injection through the casting decision into this high modernist project presented a serious challenge to a poetics that sought to bypass dominant social structures. [End Page 447]

An important question about the 1934 production of Four Saints is whether the ostensible refusal of Stein's libretto to engage the discourse of the current social structure remained intact when embodied by a black cast in performance. I will argue that cultural narratives of race, which were reinforced by certain directorial choices, defeated her linguistic strategy for circumventing dominant structures. In fact, those narratives reinforced Stein's poetic project and complemented her artistic goals.

Landscape Theatre, Narrative and Identity

Stein's landscape conception of theater, which defies the traditional use of narrative and character, has an established place among major theatre and performance theories. The philosophical and artistic framework upon which her landscape performance pieces such as Four Saints are based can be inferred from writings such as The Geographical History of America and Lectures in America, both compiled after she saw the 1934 production of Four Saints. In Geographical History, she suggests that landscape theater is the presentation of a state of existing as opposed to a story or character sketch. The first time she uses act and scene titles in the book, suggesting a play, they precede a declaration of existence: "I am I because my little dog knows me." 2 Throughout the book she questions the role of the "little dog," or audience/observer, in delineating existence; it is clear that the Steinian theatre of Geographical History is concerned with the experience and acknowledgment of being rather than with narrative. Her theatrical goals find a parallel in the concept of spectacle, a nonnarrative flood of sights and sounds similar to a circus. Stein insinuated in Lectures in America that producing a theatrical experience of general, nonintellectual sensation was her goal: "All a child's feeling of the theater is two things. One which is in a way like a circus that is the general movement and light and air which any theater has and a great deal of glitter in the light and a great deal of height in the air." 3

The states of existence and being that are necessary for this theatrical experience are not to be confused with identity, which is a product of history and narrative structure. Because of identity's grounding in history, a "state of confusion" according to Stein, it has no place in a masterpiece, which is rooted in "the human mind": "Now identity remembers and so it...

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