Director Lawrence Kornfeld on text and subtext in staging Stein's works

The World of Gertrude Stein - illustrated biographical site

Toklas and Stein, 1908

Stein and Toklas, 1934

About GERTRUDE STEIN, poet and librettist "Eventually, I suppose, the world will come round to recognizing Stein as one of our great librettists, if not our greatest playwright," writes Michael Feingold of The Village Voice. Stein's characteristically modern style is better known to musical theater audiences through works like Virgil Thomson's "Four Saints In Three Acts" and "The Mother of Us All" and Al Carmines' "In Circles." "Made By Two" is an imaginative musical setting of a text that, according to Feingold's estimate, was written in 1916.

Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing.

Adventure is making the distant approach nearer but romance is having what is where it is which is not where you are stay where it is.

It is not what France gave you but what it did not take from you that was important.

Very likely education does not make very much difference.

Romance is everything.

I simply contend that the middle-class ideal which demands that people be affectionate, respectable, honest and content, that they avoid excitements and cultivate serenity is the ideal that appeals to me, it is in short the ideal of affectionate family life, of honorable business methods.

It is always a mistake to be plain-spoken.

A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.

I like a thing simple but it must be simple through complication. Everything must come into your scheme, otherwise you cannot achieve real simplicity.

I tell you boys there ain't any answer, just you believe me, there ain't any answer,... there ain't going to be any answer, there never has been any answer, that's the answer.

Does Gertrude Stein make you mad? Her work seems to have that effect on some people I know. They read a couple sentences like these:

Go lack go lack use to her. Cocoa and clear soup and oranges and oat-meal. Whist bottom whist close, whist clothes, woodling. Cocoa and clear soup and oranges and oat-meal. Pain soup, suppose it is question, suppose it is butter, real is, real is only, only excreate, only excreate a no since. A no, a no since, a no since when, a no since when since, a no since when since a no since when since, a no since, a no since when since, a no since, a no, a no since a no since, a no since, a no since. (from "Tender Buttons")

And become indignant. Is this poetry, or an elaborate hoax?

Perhaps their anger and indignation stem from a firmly held belief that words have strict meanings, and that their usage is governed by very specific rules of syntax and grammar. The reader may think: I was scolded by my English teacher when I wrote incomplete sentences and made mistakes in vocabulary and pronunciation. Surely this Stein woman deserves a sharp rap on the knuckles, not to mention a failing grade!

To understand Gertrude Stein's work, one must understand what was going on in the world of painting and the visual arts in the first decades of the twentieth century. This was a time when painters like Cezanne, Matisse and Picasso were creating works which revolutionized the language of visual art. Mere representation was not the goal of these pioneers of modernism; rather than create a likeness of their subject, they used the elements of visual art ­ line, form, color, texture ­ to try to capture something of the poetic essence of their subject. The components of visual art were used playfully and in unexpected ways, in an endeavor to startle the senses and portray not surfaces but essences.

Stein was a close personal friend of some of the most important artists working in Paris in the early part of the twentieth century, and a passionate advocate of their artistic goals. She was also inspired to try to pursue a similar sort of artistic exploration in the world of fiction, poetry and drama. It is useful to think of Stein as a "literary cubist," playfully experimenting with the materials of language ­ vocabulary, syntax, sound and sense ­ in an endeavor to express the unexpressible. Her dramas further confound the reader, since she abandons conventional elements of the stage like character and action to create a sensuous landscape of visual and verbal imagery.

The eyes accept the complexities of transformation, juxtaposition and collage in the visual arts more readily because of the nature of the world around us and the way our brains process visual imagery. We experience visual distortions when we see a subject from an odd angle, or with unexpected lighting. Flip through a magazine, surf the channels on your television, walk down an urban street and your eye is bombarded with countless unrelated images. Visual images are not expected to possess a consistent clarity or relate in a strictly linear, logical way.

In the world of language, however, we are conditioned to expect meaning from verbal discourse. The sonic and sensuous aspects of language are usually secondary to the logical content being communicated. Stein was a pioneer in a new approach to the use of language, and many have followed her example to produce a rich body of experimental writing in the last century; one example among many is the American poet e. e. cummings, who spent the years of his young adulthood in Paris and was an acquaintance of Stein's.

There is one place where the aural and sensuous values of words are always heightened, and that is when words are used in song,. Many songs have passages in which the literal meaning of language is stretched or distorted, or where nonsense sounds figure prominently in the text. Repetition, a standard feature in Stein's poetic syntax, is also a common feature of songwriting. Language becomes looser and richer when enhanced by the emotional qualities that music provides.

Some of Stein's greatest contributions to the modern theater occurred when her poetic and dramatic texts were set to music. In her lifetime, the greatest example of this was her opera "Four Saints In Three Acts," a collaboration with composer Virgil Thomson which premiered in the United States in the 1930's; "Four Saints" proved to be a landmark work in the history of modernism in the performing arts. She wrote a second libretto for Thomson, "The Mother of Us All," the music for which was not completed til after Stein's death. The 1960's saw a resurgence of interest in Stein's texts as the basis for opera or musical theater works. Composer Al Carmines and director Lawrence Kornfeld created a total of six works with texts by Stein at the Judson Poets Theater, including "In Circles" and "The Making of Americans."

When Stein's words are set to music for presentation on the musical stage, they become imbued with meaning in the process. In short, one might say that Stein was meant for singing!