Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein's Avant-Garde Theater by Sarah Bay-Cheng (review)

Reviews 337 butch than Wuomos' lover actually was, I found myself wishing I could read what Jones thought of the film. WORKS CITED Aristotle, Poetics. Trans. S, H, Butcher. Dramatic The01Y and Criticism: Greeks to Grorowski. Ed. Bernard F. Dukore. Forth Worth: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974. 31- 55. Case, Sue-Ellen. Feminism and Theatre. New York: Methuen, 1988. SARAH BAY-CHENG. Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein's Avant-Garde Theater. London: Routledge, 2004. Pp. 207, illustrated. $60 (Hb). Reviewed by Nicola Shaughnessy, University ofKent The cover copy for Mama Dada claims that it is "the first major study of Stein's dramatic works within the history of the theatrical and cinematic avant-gardes," thereby sigrialling a significant repositioning of a body of dramatic writing previously addressed at full length in Betsy Alayne Ryan's Gertrude Stein's Theater of the Absolute (1984) and Jane Palatini Bowers' They Watch Me as They Watch This: Gertrude Stein's Metadrama (199 I). Whereas Bowers had focused on Stein's drama as linguistic games ("langscapes" is her term), and contested the relevance of actual performance in her work, Mama Dada puts theatre at the centre of Stein's dramatic work. Bay-Cheng devotes her final chapter to the plays in performance, linking them with modernist and postmodemist avant-gardes, and assesses her affinities with Dada, futurism, and surrealism, and her influence upon The Living Theatre, Richard Foreman, and Robert Wilson. If this is reasonably familiar territory for Stein performance scholarship, the inclusion of Stein'S screenplays is not, and Bay-Cheng deploys these previously overlooked texts to formulate a model of a Steinian queer avant-garde informed by cinematic principles of fragmentation, repetition , and montage, so that "just as Stein repeats words and phrases to create a single, dynamic moment on the page, cinema uses repeated and simultaneous images to create the same effect on screen" (31). Picasso's portraiture of Stein, glossed as an apt homage for a writer who "embraced the past" (I) and continually sought the new, provides an initial point of departure for a study that emphasises the role of the visual image, whether drawn from fine art, film, theatre, or photography, in the evolution of Stein's writing practice. As such, this book argues for the importance of a visual (as well as aural) dimension to Stein's theatre aesthetic that defines it as "both a precursor of American experimental performance and a landmark in REVIEWS American dramatic history" (4). Stein is thus retrospectively affiliated with a contemporary image-based avant-garde characterised by its use of mixed media, new technology and collage, and its interest in the aesthetics of dispersal and fragmentation: the cover image, incorporating a production shot of The Wooster Group's production House/Lights (which used Stein's Dr FausIus Lighls the Lighls) in conjunction with Joseph Mawra's film Olga's House of Shame (1964), is selected as embodying "the essence of Slein's drama as fragmented, technologically driven, and queer I...J. IT]he production accentuates its fusion of film and theater, including violent collisions between the two" (138). Stein's revival and survival in contemporary theatre is attributable to this synergy. Bay-Cheng's triangulation of the cinematic, the avant-garde, and the queer cites the "non-reproductive" quality of the avant-garde image (a formulation that, although she does not feature in this study, calls to mind Peggy Phelan's ontology of performance as representation without reproduction ), as well as the essentially visual nature of queer identity politics: rIlf the cinema and the avant-garde relate primarily through their manipulation of the visual, and their conventions of editing, then queerness completes the triangle as the human embodiment of the visual collage by combining both masculine and feminine, male and female. into one body. Queerness,like cinema and the avantgarde , is primarily visual. All three can be seen as codes that must be cracked in order to understand the texl/image/body. (17) The importance of code-cracking runs through the book in other ways: for any Stein scholar, as Bay-Cheng acknowledges, one of the key challenges is to make her work accessible, to demystify texts that may appear opaque, arbitrary...