Operas & Plays

Plot

Although Gertrude Stein, as much as James Joyce, is often considered the most famous and influential of modern experimental writers of prose and poetry, few realize the breadth and depth of her contribution to theater and opera, which hardly stops with the justly famous collaboration with Virgil Thomson, "Four Saints in Three Acts." She considered Operas and Plays to be her definitive statement, as of 1932, for the stage. Born in 1874 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, raised in Oakland, California, she lived in France from 1903 till her death in 1946.
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Well before Beckett or Pinter," writes James R. Mellow in his new introduction here, "Stein immobilized her characters in talk, talk, talk." Whether or not the average reader will want to embark upon the particularly whimsical yet radically demanding journey of Stein's Operas and Plays may not be the real question; but if the desire were there, its fulfillment would now once again be possible. Stein self-published the Operas and Plays in 1932 in Paris (in the famous Plain Edition), and the extreme rarity of that book has until now made it very nearly inaccessible to readers. Here once again are the dramatic works of Stein from the well-known 1927 "Four Saints In Three Acts" (done with music by Virgil Thomson) on through 20 other pieces including, for example, "Saints And Singing" (1922), "Civilization" (1931) and "Say It With Flowers" (1931) and "A Movie" (1920). -- from review in Kirkus