Staging Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein's dramatic texts rely on the absence of many landmarks of traditional theatre, but absence is a very difficult thing to stage. Iconoclastic directors and production teams - including Virgil Thomson, the Living Theatre, the Judson Poets Theatre, the Santa Fe Opera, the Glimmerglass Opera, the Wooster Group, Robert Wilson, Anne Bogart, Frank Galati and Heiner Goebbels - have ardently roamed Stein's spare dramatic 'landscapes', but even these convention-defying artists had to fill some of her absences in order to bring the texts to life on stage. Inevitably contemporary culture infiltrates Stein's pristine topography via these extra-textual additions, transforming it in ways virtually unimaginable when the reader encounters the text on the printed page. It is only by mapping the intersections of written text, performance text, and context, that one can gain a full appreciation of what Stein's dramatic writing has meant at various historical moments, how she herself has been imagined, and how her writing has transformed the landscape of the American alternative theatre.

Autorentext
LESLIE DURHAM is Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts at Boise State University, USA.

Inhalt
Introduction Gertrude Stein: Living and Writing the American Landscape Behind the Mask of Primitivism: Untangling Images of Gertrude Stein and African Americans in Four Saints in Three Acts and Frank Galati's Each One As She May Exile from Mass Culture: Charting the Spaces of Perceptual Freedom in the Living Theatre's Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights and the Judson Poets' In Circles Pop Parades and Surreal Pageants: Staging National Identity and the Struggle for Women's Rights in The Mother of Us All at the Santa Fe and Glimmerglass Operas Coded Statements of Desire: Outing Meaning in Robert Wilson's Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights , the Wooster Group's House/Lights , and Anne Bogart's Gertrude and Alice Dreams of a New Frontier: Mapping Gertrude Stein's Twenty-First Century Identity on a Global Stage Selected Bibliography