The Mother of Us All

Figure 1.

(From L to R) Tracy Saliefendic (Gertrude Stein), Joanna Johnston (Susan B. Anthony), and Ruthann Manley (Anne) in the Glimmerglass Opera production of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s The Mother of Us All, directed by Christopher Alden. Photo: George Mott/Glimmerglass Opera.

Figure 2.

(From L to R) Tracy Saliefendic (Gertrude Stein), Joanna Johnston (Susan B. Anthony), and Ruthann Manley (Anne) in the Glimmerglass Opera production of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s The Mother of Us All, directed by Christopher Alden. Photo: George Mott/Glimmerglass Opera.

On the first page of the libretto for The Mother of Us All, the Gertrude Stein/Virgil Thomson homage to Susan B. Anthony, Stein classified the work as a pageant. In doing so, she harkened back to those turn-of-the century local pageants that were conceived not so much as entertainment, but rather as a method of educating a community through a celebration of that community’s history. Often these events attempted to suggest the role that community played in the nation’s history. Pageantry continues to provide the clue to a successful staging of The Mother of Us All, and director Christopher Alden paid careful attention to this in his Glimmerglass Opera production.

Stein’s text, though characteristic of her experiments with language and narrative, contains a story, and that story strives to place both Susan B. Anthony and Stein herself in history. Thomson’s score, largely reminiscent of folk music and Baptist hymns, typifies the music of American pageantry. Peopled by characters such as Daniel Webster, John Adams, Lillian Russell, and Constance Fletcher, as well as several allegorical figures, the work defies historical time, challenging directors and audiences to readjust their historical picture to accommodate this strange mixture of characters.

Alden and set designer Allen Moyer met this challenge with two highly flexible sets. Susan B. Anthony’s room, where much of the action took place, contained only her desk, piled high with books, and a chair for her friend Anne (Anthony’s friend Anna Howard Shaw, who also brought to mind Stein’s partner Alice B. Toklas). Both desk and chair leaned against a huge, blue paisley wall, equipped with invisible openings and doors that would pop open, introducing various characters and scenarios. When the text called for Gertrude S. and Virgil T. (aptly sung by young artists Tracy Saliefendic and Nicolai Janitzky) to act as narrators, two “windows” popped open above Susan and Anne. In yet another scene, a larger section of this wall opened to reveal a stage within a stage on which a series of Susan B.’s “dreams” were performed; they combined to present an epic panorama of the America that she hoped to change. On this same stage, Anthony also encountered “The Chorus of the V.I.P.”—representative of the very men who championed the laws she hoped to amend. As they sang of their “special rights,” they toyed with a scantily clad Lillian Russell, a timely directorial detail Stein did not include in her text.

Rather than place some of the other scenes in a political meeting tent or on a village green as Stein instructed, the only other set Alden and Moyer created was a huge meeting hall lined by chairs and a long blackboard. On this blackboard, the ever-present Stein figure (Saliefendic) wrote words, thereby enacting the librettist’s own language experiments. For instance, during the scene when Anthony and others sang “To choose a name is feeble,” all the characters’ names were inscribed on the board. Even as those names seemed a mere exercise in penmanship, just the fact of their being written assigned them a meaning. Indeed, one might say those names came to signify because they were written on a blackboard, and the silent Stein figure grimly pursued this act of signifying, which she then undercut by erasing. Through instances such as this, the production foregrounded how...