Gertrude Stein: two plays, part one: What Happened

WE DO LIKE TO GO to the theater, Lindsey and I. We see all the plays in Ashland at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival; we see nearly all the plays in Los Angeles (Glendale, actually) at A Noise Within. We catch occasional plays closer to home, in Berkeley or San Francisco or even up here in Sonoma county, in Santa Rosa or Sebastopol.
We like the standard repertory; we like new plays; we like the classics; we like drama originally in other languages. We'll be in Glendale in a week or ten days to see Shakespeare, an adaptation of Dostoevsky, and Michael Frayn's wonderfully funny Noises Off (confusingly, perhaps, at the repertory company called A Noise Within, playing its last season this year in Glendale before moving next season to a new house in Pasadena).

I have a lot of favorite playwrights: Chekhov, Shakespeare, Euripides, Moliere, Pirandello, to name five who come quickly to mind. Behind them come dozens more — I won't go into that now; maybe some day I'll draw up a list of Top Hundred. (I did that years ago for composers, listing them by nationalities; it was an amusing little exercise.)

Right now, though, my irreducible Favorite Playwright is Gertrude Stein. I met her dramatic work over fifty years ago, through Virgil Thomson's setting of her Four Saints in Three Acts. This began an enthusiasm that's never ended — you can read its history in my little book Why I Read Stein. I've set two of Stein's plays as little operas myself, and would love to finish the trilogy if someone would only promise to produce it. (Ladies Voices and I Like It to Be a Play have been produced; What Happened A Play remains to be composed.)

Well. When I heard the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley was producing a number of one-act plays, and that among them would be two of Stein's plays, I was absolutely delighted and made plans to drive down to see them, and Sunday we saw two of the three programs, one with What Happened A Play, the other with Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters.

I wish I could be more enthusiastic about what we saw. Each program opened with Eugène Ionesco's Salutations: five actors, hundreds of adjectives, recited in alphabetical order, in two quite different physical productions. The afternoon production continued with Suzan-Lori Parks's Devotees in the Garden of Love in a strikingly beautiful physical production, with impressive acting by Jessica Charles, Kelly Strickland, and Dekyl Rongé, but delivered so stridently (as was much of the Ionesco) that the intelligibility of the lines was all too frequently lost completely.
After the intermission the program promised What Happened. What we got was that play, in all its textual beauty, with interpolations of perhaps improvised, perhaps written-out lines having little to do with Stein's play, sometimes in Spanish, nearly always mundane.
A director's note may explain this:

…I initially intended to clarify at some length Stein's approach towards language and art with the hope of assisting the audience in "understanding" this admittedly challenging yet beautiful text. But, in the end, I realized that such definitive understanding is exactly the opposite of what she intended. Therefore, please just sit back and watch, hear, think, and feel. Sometimes we push too much for a singular meaning.

Scott Wallin is right to reject singular meaning, but wrong, I think, to multiply it unnecessarily. He is particularly wrong, in my opinion, to let his audience assume everything heard here was Gertrude Stein's. Her plays are famously overheard conversation, but they have an integrity, stylistically and theatrically, that comes from a single observer's point of view (far-reachingly intelligent though it be), filtered through a single writer's editorial and expressive technique.

Stein herself discusses this better than I can. (She's as redoubtable a critic as she is a playwright.) I quote from Jason Fichtel's useful discussion 'When this you see remember me': The Postmodern Aesthetic of Gertrude Stein's Drama, posted at time-sense, an on-line quarterly I'm going to have to explore:

I think and always have thought that if you write a play you ought to announce that it is a play and that is what I did. What Happened. A Play. . . . I realized then as anybody can know that something is always happening. Something is always happening, anybody knows a quantity of stories of people's lives . . . everybody knows so many stories and what is the use of telling another story. What is the use of telling a story since there are so many and everybody knows so many and tells so many. . . . So naturally what I wanted to do in my play was what everybody did not always know or always tell.

[from Stein's Lectures in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959), p. 207]