"They Watch Me as They Watch This": Gertrude Stein's Metadrama by Jane Palatini Bowers (review)

470 Book Reviews The second section of the volume is devoted to studies of Pirandello's gen~ral background from the Sicilian experience to the rapport with Surrealism, often discussed and still debated. Parts 3. 4, and 5 are devoted exclusively to Pirandello's theatre; in the first of these three sections, one finds primarily essays on two plays of PirandelIo's famous metatheatrical trilogy - Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) and Tonight We Improvise (I929). The last play of the trilogy is discussed in Olga Ragusa's intriguing essay "Tollight We Improvise: Spectacle and Tragedy," while Maurice Valency and Susan Bassnet! devote their studies to Hemy IV ( 1922), certainly one of Pirandello's best plays. Special mention must go to Emanuele Licastro's discussion of Six Characters as a critique of traditional theatre and as the "first, clearest, and most exemplary instance" of the "stereoscopic image in modem theatre" (219). The influence of Pirandello's theatre on modern drama is masterfully outlined by Martin Esslin. In the same section, one also finds another essay by Jana O'Keefe Bazzoni, who develops an interesting discussion of the clown figure as it becomes the catalyser of some Pirandellian concerns such as mUltiple identity, role playing, and reality versus illusion in the theatres of both Pirandello and Daria Fa, one of the most controversial figures of the ltalian theatrical scene of the lasl thirty years. The section devoted to productions of Pirandello's theatrical pieces opens with two interviews by John Louis DiGaetani, the first of which is with Robert Brustein and will certainly be of utmost interest to readers. The last segment of the volume is a section whose title speaks for itself, " Pirandello's Non~theatrical Works," and is composed of four excellent essays by Glauco Cambon, Douglas Radcliff-Umstead, Robert Dombroski, and Maria Rosaria Vitti-Alexander. The volume concludes with four interesting appendixes. In the first, one fi nds DiGaetani's translation of three poems first published during Pirandello's life and located at the Biblioteca Nazionale in Rome; the second provides a production history of Six Characters and Henry IV by lana O'Keefe Bazzoni. The last two are a list of Pirandello's publications, and a selected bibliography on his narrative and dramatic works. MANUELA GIERI, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO JANE PALATINI DOWERS. "Tirey Watch Me as They Watch This" : Gertrude Stein's Melodrama. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1991. pp. x, 168. $22.95. Of all Gertrude Stein's work, her plays have been most neglected critically. This is not surprising, since any study o(Stein's plays must first attempt to define which of her works are plays and which are not. And while Stein wrote many plays, few of them were perfonned and Stein left no directions for future perfonnances. Jane Palatini Bowers's "They Watch Me as They Watch This": Gertrude Stein's Metadrama navigates this difficult terrain well as she discusses Stein's long career of play writing. Bowers's investigation into the plays usefully divides Stein's work into four periods: the conversation plays of 191 5 to 1919; the lang-scape plays of 1920-33 (the Book Reviews 471 tenn is Bowers's own, a pun on what Stein called her "landscape" plays); the theoretical writings on plays of '934-37; and what Bowers calls " the last plays" of 1938-46. Such divisions, because they present the beginnings of workable definitions of the genres, are useful and apt. Similarly, one of the most valuable observations in this book comes in the appendix, "A Chronology of Gertrude Stein's Published Plays," where Bowers defines which Stein texts actually are plays through "some combination of the following criteria: (I) the title or subtitle indicates that the text is an opera or play, or the text appears in the volume Operas alld Plays; (2) the lext consists entirely of conversational address and response; (3) the text is divided into a main text and a side text which includes character ascriptions, act/scene divisions, and scene setting; or (4) the text is metadramatic and contains internal evidence that it was written for eventual performance" (137), While Bowers's definitions of a difficult genre...