For those few that read her, and continue to do so, Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) is an acquired taste, a taste I confess that I acquired decades ago. What attracted me to her, and still does, in addition to her writings and her ideas, is her common sense, an aspect that is rarely mentioned when the subject of Stein surfaces.
I guess I started out like most, reading “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,” one of Stein’s most popular and most easily readable books. I then jumped to “Three Lives,” “Tender Buttons,” “Q.E.D,” her Lectures in America, and “The Geographical History of America or The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind,” arguably her most brilliant book.
I also plodded though some 1000 pages of “The Making of Americans” and continued to study and pay attention to Stein’s various outpourings, among them her two popular operas, Four Saints in Three Acts and The Mother of Us All, for which Virgil Thomas wrote the music. Add to this a number of visits to her two Paris residences—when in Paris I never fail to pay my respects to 27 Rue de Fleurus where Stein’s salons took place and her storied art collection hung, to pass by Christine # 5 her and Alice’s last home, and to visit Stein and Alice at Père Lachaise Cemetery where they are buried next to each other. During an extensive tour of the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, another of my Stein epiphanies, I got to hold actually hold her glasses in my hand and lightly finger one of her vests. By now you get the picture: Gertrude Stein Ces’t Moi!
All of which leads me to Obie Award winner David Greenspan’s amazing performance of Composition…Master-Pieces…Identity, in actuality two of Stein’s lectures, “Composition as Explanation,” and “What Are Masterpieces, and Why Are There So Few of Them,” and “Identity a Poem,” the latter of whose delivery fell flat and went splat!
Still, the lectures were the thing and on a bare stage with nothing more than a chair, a water bottle, and a table, Greenspan succeeded in negotiating Stein’s difficult thicket of repetitive words, thoughts and ideas, sans machete, in both “Composition,” this by his awesome memory alone, and “Master-Pieces” simply by reading. With perfect timing, and his “just right” laying down of Stein words and rhythms – Stein’s layered writing here is akin to painting a picture – coupled with well-placed verbal stressings and clever use of physical and facial movements, Greenspan was able to bring Stein’s very words alive. Equally important, if not more, major meanings were excavated, and thrown onto the table and into the light, so to speak.
