Staging Gertrude Stein: Absence, Culture, and the Landscape of American Alternative Theatre (review)

The last twenty years have been good to Gertrude Stein, particularly her theatrical reputation. Although she endured years of ridicule and saw only two of her plays produced during her lifetime, Stein reemerged in the late twentieth century as a major theatrical figure underpinning a wide range of experimental theatres. In his American Avant-Garde Theatre: A History (2000), Arnold Aronson cited Stein as one of the fundamental influences on the US avant-garde theatre, and American Theatre magazine covered the recurrence of Stein as a character on US stages. Throughout the 1990s Stein experienced a kind of theatrical comeback, as adaptations of her novels, plays, and biography proliferated in professional and academic theatres. Building from this theatrical attention, Leslie Atkins Durham's Staging Gertrude Stein is a timely consideration of the theatrical legacy of Gertrude Stein in the US alternative theatre. Engaging both Stein's presence as a public persona and the absence of traditional theatrical elements in her plays, Durham traces the evolution of Stein's work, from her earliest collaboration with composer Virgil Thomson to recent adaptations of her novels and plays by Frank Galati and The Wooster Group.

Durham opens her book with a portrait of Stein herself as a cultural performance, particularly focusing on her 1934 tour of the United States. This tour, which brought Stein back to the US for the first time in over thirty years, marked both the literary success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and the theatrical success of Four Saints in Three Acts. For Durham, this tour established Stein both as an American (although she spent nearly her entire adult life in France) and as a cultural persona. In this opening chapter, the author attempts to "spatialize Gertrude Stein's life story" (9) as the model for later productions of her plays, and she returns to Stein's biography throughout her analysis as a touchstone for the theatre to follow. It is an intriguing premise, particularly given Durham's speculation that the refashioning of Stein's public persona reveals significant themes in US theatre history. Most importantly, the space that Durham sees around Stein herself and in her plays is ultimately an open one—an absence—that theatre artists after her death would attempt to fill with their own theatrical experiments.

In her analysis of these performances, Durham eschews linear chronology in favor of thematic groupings of productions. Her emphasis here is predominantly performance analysis, a "mapping" as she calls it, of representative productions. Despite the openness of Stein's texts, Durham detects "four dominant identity issues" (4) that have preoccupied US theatre artists in productions of Stein: African American cultural identity, social rebellion against mass culture, feminism and national identity, and sexual identity. Within each of these thematic areas, Durham presents interpretations of Stein's plays as responsive to the cultural contexts in which they occur, though at times the connections feel strained. For example, she convincingly juxtaposes Virgil Thomson's successful 1934 production of Four Saints in Three Acts against his disappointing revival in 1952. By tracing the tropes of primitivism, race, and their social reception in both productions, Durham convincingly demonstrates the failure of the 1952 production as a measure of the cultural shifts since its premiere. However, the third production in this chapter, Frank Galati's adaptation of Stein's "Melanctha" as Each One As She May fits awkwardly among the two Thomson productions.

Other chapters fit together more smoothly, in part because the productions within them follow either the same source text or texts from roughly the same period in Stein's work, as in Durham's comparison between The Living Theatre's production of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights and the Judson Poets' Theatre's "In Circles." Although referring to radically different texts, Durham unites these respective productions in their use of Stein and her abstraction to oppose the rise of mass culture. Similarly, she...