geography and plays
staging the work of
Gertrude Stein
I set out to write a play like Gertrude Stein would write a play and realized I didn’t need to because she already did.
Then I turned her plays into performances.
I saw Robert Wilson’s production of Gertrude Stein’s and Virgil Thompson’s opera “Four Saints in Three Acts” when I was 14 years old. At that time I was already looking for new ways to approach theatre, and this experience displayed a possibility for unconventional productions to arouse awe and elicit emotions.
The texts that Stein published as plays and operas are highly abstract and require a creative interpretation in order to be staged. They rarely communicate a discernible story and often don’t even name characters. While engaging with the texts I often find that they seem to be about whatever is on my mind at the time. This open, fertile ground for imagination and the wit, insight, musicality, and playfulness of her words continue to draw me into Stein’s work.
“Do Let Us Go Away, a play”
“Not Sightly, a play”
“Geography and Plays by Gertrude Stein”
This piece was set to premier as a stage play at the Orlando Fringe Festival in 2020 until the festival was cancelled due to the spread of COVID-19, at which point I adapted it into a screenplay and have been working on the film version ever since.
“Do Let Us Go Away, a play” is from Stein’s Geography and Plays collection. It is a landscape view of Mallorca near the beginning of WWI, composed of many statements - observations, declarations, and gossip - from a broad array of voices. The matter is often pedestrian (shopping, eating, real estate, weather) while a tone of anxious uncertainty underscores throughout.
My approach to the staging of the piece would have two actors fluidly embodying the many voices as they bounce about the stage.
When it became necessary to work within pandemic-imposed conditions, I divided the text between 65 actors and solicited friends and collaborators in lockdown around the world to record various sections. I provided the actors with minimal direction - usually a brief character description or general action, giving them the freedom to determine the specifics of their recorded bits - location, costumes, props, etc. The resulting footage captures a moment of collective isolation, fear, boredom, and creativity, similar to the moment illustrated by Stein’s text.
I am now in the process of giving the assembled 264 clips a cohesive visual language and dynamic temporal flow through the process of hand-drawn rotoscope animation.
“Do Let Us Go Away, a play”
promotional imagery for the staged version(Photos by Misty Blu Day)
still from a public reading of the staged version
footage provided by actors during pandemic lockdown
stills from the animated film (in progress)
animation short (sample)This one is also taken from Geography and Plays and premiered at the Orlando Fringe Festival in 2022.
The text of “Not Sightly, a play”, like much of Stein’s work, does not communicate any clear meaning though in this one the material seems to address the reader’s experience of not being given anything to understand - the anxiety caused by this experience, but also a possibility of liberation and release.
When exploring ways to stage the work I dove into the proper names included in the text for ideas on imagery and actionable scenarios: “Paul”, “Edith”, “Fairchild”, “The Bruces”, etc. The most useful name for me was “Cora”, which led me to the Ancient Greek Eleusinian Mysteries - a ritual honoring the goddesses Kora and Demeter. The Mysteries were strictly secretive - anyone found divulging what occurred could face capital punishment. Because of this, historians today have no definitive proof of what happened during key moments of the proceedings. This unknowability struck me as particularly in synch with Stein’s text, which also contains seemingly religious and ritualistic material.
I staged the piece as what I call a hyperpop puppet show - digital music, sounds, and manipulated live oration of the text heard while an assemblage of sculptural tableaux are animated with minimal movement and shifting lights. The imagery drew largely from the idea of the Eleusinian Mysteries, events from the stories of Demeter and Kora, and other religious and naturalist iconography illustrated through a combination of classical and contemporary aesthetics.
“Not Sightly, a play”
production photo
promotional imagery
“Geography and Plays by Gertrude Stein” was my first foray into staging Stein. It premiered at the Orlando International Fringe Theatre Festival in 2019. The text used in the production was a combination of three pieces published in Stein’s Geography and Plays collection: “Susie Asado”, a musical portrait of a flamenco dancer, “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene”, a portrait of two women living in Paris that is believed to be the first literary use of the word “gay” to mean homosexual, and “White Wines”, a whimsical declaration of liberation from domesticity.
“Geography and Plays by Gertrude Stein”
production photos
