Gertrude Stein is famous as an early champion of writers like Ernest Hemingway and artists like Picasso (whose “Portrait of Gertrude Stein” is a prized possession of The Metropolitan Museum of Art), and as an often inscrutable writer who nevertheless wrote a bestseller, “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,” a sort-of-memoir about her years in Paris written in the voice of Alice B. Toklas, her lover of 39 years. But eight decades after Gertrude Stein’s death, I now also know her as the inspiration for some damn fine theatrical productions, including two different inventive adaptations of Stein’s and Virgil Thomson’s abstruse avant-garde opera “Four Saints in Three Acts” — most recently David Greenspan’s one-man adaptation (without the music) — and, now at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, “The Marriage of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein.”
The play — actually written and directed by Edward Einhorn, artistic director of the New York-based Untitled Theater Company #61 – is a clever and often hilarious 80 minutes that nails the dizzying repetitive rhythms and crazy logic of the writer best known for “a rose is a rose is a rose.” It is also spot on in its satirical depictions of both Hemingway and Picasso, as well as quick hits on other artists, writers and intellectuals of the early twentieth century. Layered into this exercise in high brow absurdism and low brow silliness is some wide-ranging, subtly pointed commentary about artistic genius, prejudice, gender roles, relationships and the institution of marriage.
Four actors portray dozens of characters, all of them guests at Gertrude Stein’s famous Paris salon before, during and after the wedding. But since the play is written in the exasperating manner of Gertrude Stein, it’s not as straightforward as that. The first line, by the one-named Barsha, the actress whose principal role is that of Gertrude Stein:
“This is a play about Alice Toklas. In this play, which is a play about Alice Toklas I play Gertrude Stein pretending to be Alice Toklas pretending to be Gertrude Stein.”
Then Alyssa Simon as Alice says: “This is a play about Gertrude Stein. In this play which is a play about Gertrude Stein I play Alice Toklas pretending to be Gertrude Stein pretending to be Alice Toklas.”
From then on, each character meta-theatrically introduces themselves as “pretending” to play themselves or somebody else. (Pretending eventually becomes not just a shtick, but a thought-provoking theme — how much did Gertrude Stein have to pretend as a Jew living in Nazi-occupied France, and a woman who loved a woman?)
Grant Neale performs as Hemingway and simultaneously as a matador, whom the play suggests was the true object of his ardor rather than any of his wives. Jenny Lee Mitchell performs as Picasso and simultaneously as two of Picasso’s mistresses and his wife. This seems in deliberate if unspoken contrast to the monogamy of Stein and Toklas, who of course were actually prohibited legally from marrying. Later, the prejudice becomes more explicit with Gertrude portraying her brother Leo telling Alice “It’s not that I don’t like you because you are a lesbian, it’s that I don’t like lesbians because I don’t like you.”
The imagined wedding ceremony itself, conducted under a chuppah, is a mix of the comic and the poignant , officiated by Picasso pretending to be Carl Van Vechten (Stein’s good friend and eventual literary executor) pretending to be Papa Woojums (which was the actual nickname Stein bestowed on him) pretending to join these women in holy matrimony, and Hemingway pretending to be all the wedding guests (his brief burst of wedding guest chatter made me laugh out loud.) The absurd Stein-like repetition of the vows struck me like lightning: Yes, Gertrude Stein’s repetitive writing mimics – embodies? – ritual — which helps explain the power both of her writing and of ritual. And then, despite the silliness of it all, there is something memorable and moving in the speech of the officiate. He describes marriage as “a life-time commitment, not a mere epigram or couplet but a book of inordinate length, full of repetitions and digressions, that may occasionally in its later half drift off into self-indulgences, but is ultimately redeemed by the devotion and love it represents.”
***** The Marriage of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein is being presented as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe at Dram at Gilded Balloon Patter House through August 25
