Breathing Life
into the Words of Gertrude Stein
"Composition…Master-Pieces…Identity"
Reviewed by Edward Rubin
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| David Greenspan. By
Eric Carter. |
"Composition…Master-Pieces…Identity"
Text: Gertrude Stein
Conceived and Performed by David Greenspan
Production Design: Carolyn Mraz
Lighting Design: Tláloc Lopez-Watermann
Target Margin Theater at
The Connelly Theater
220 East 4th Street
New York, New York
Previews beginning Friday, May 29, 2015
Opened: Monday, June 1, 2015
Closed: Saturday, June 27, 2015
Mon- Sun, Varying Times and Dates
Tickets $25.00 www.targetmargin.org
Reviewed: Thursday, June 25, 2015
For those few that read her, and continue to do so,
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) is an acquired taste, a taste I confess
that I acquired decades ago. What attracted me to her, and still does,
in addition to her writings and her ideas, is her common sense, an
aspect that is rarely mentioned when the subject of Stein surfaces.
Take for instance the following quotes and you will
get an idea of the lady's wide-ranging thoughts, provocative, fresh,
timely, humorous, and common sense among them.
"It's funny that men who are supposed to be scientific
cannot get themselves to realize the basic principle of physics, that
action and reaction are equal and opposite, that when you persecute
people you always rouse them to be strong and stronger."
"Just as everybody has the vote including woman,
I think children should, because
as a child is conscious of itself then it has to me an existence and
has a stake in what happens."
"Money is always there but the pockets change.
It is not in the same pockets after a change, and this is all there
is to say about money."
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| David Greenspan.
By Eric Carter. |
"If you are looking down while you are walking
it is better to walk uphill as the ground is nearer."
"I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it."
"Ezra Pound is the village explainer. That's OK if you are a
village. If not not.
"An audience is always warming but it must never be necessary
to your work."
Also reeling me into the Stein camp was her genius, a self-diagnosis,
delivered in both speech and word, that she had no shame in trumpeting.
"Let me listen to me and not them," she wisely wrote.
Another Stein a quote that I identify with wholeheartedly and just
discovered in my research for this review is "Argument to me
is the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing
the other side of defying it."
My own version, "When ever I say something I run to the other
side of the room to refute it." arrived one or more decades ago.
It took that long to actually own up to it.
Interesting enough, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1999-1951) the German philosopher,
who shares an interest with Stein in Propositions, echoes similar
sentiments.
Having just read The Duty of Genius, Ray Monk's Wittgenstein biography,
I could not help but notice the similarity in their thinking and in
their more difficult writings. I am talking more fraternal here, as
opposed to identical.
In arguing with themselves they also take the long way around in trying
to get there. Of course, as both know, and Gertrude like to say, "There
is no there."
As an extra added attraction, the basis of her fame for many, Stein
brought along with her Alice B. Toklas, her lifelong companion, her
brother Leo Stein – his book The ABC of Aesthetics is a must read
- and a slew of soon to be famous Salonettes, among the better known,
Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald—all an irresistible
cast of characters.
I guess I started out like most, reading the Autobiography
of Alice B. Toklas, one of her most popular and most easily readable
books. I then jumped to Three Lives, Tender Buttons, Q.E.D, her Lectures
in America, and The Geographical History of America or The Relation
of Human Nature To The Human Mind, arguably her most brilliant book.
I also plodded though some 1000 pages of The Making
of Americans and continued to study and pay attention to Stein's various
outpourings, among them her two popular operas, Four Saints In Three
Acts and The Mother Of Us All, for which Virgil Thomas wrote the music.
Add to this a number of visits to her two Paris residences—when
in Paris I never fail to pay my respects to 27 Rue de Fleurus where
Stein's salons took place and her storied art collection hung, to
pass by Christine # 5 her and Alice's last home, and to visit Stein
and Alice at Père Lachaise Cemetery where they are buried next to
each other.
During an extensive tour of the Harry Ransom Center
in Austin, Texas, another of my Stein epiphanies, I got to hold actually
hold her glasses in my hand and lightly finger one of her vests.
A couple of decades ago, at an equally exciting event
for this Stein Neophyte, I found myself, as the guest of Bruce Kellner,
an authority on Carl Van Vechten and Langston Hughes, sitting at a
round table with Edward M. Burns, Ula Dydo, and some forgotten others,
all the foremost Stein scholars in the country.
And then there are the countless plays based on her
writings – most often attended by Creative's intent on mining Stein's
work in order to further their own – the numerous Stein books that
I read, and of course Picasso's portrait of her at the Met.
By now you get the picture. Gertrude Stein Ces't Moi!
All of which leads me to Obie Award winner David Greenspan's
amazing performance of Composition…Master-Pieces…Identity, in actuality
two of Stein's lectures, Composition as Explanation, and What Are
Masterpieces, and Why Are There So Few of Them, and Identity A Poem,
the latter whose delivery fell flat and went splat!
Still, the lectures were the thing and on a bare stage
with nothing more than a chair, a water bottle, and a table, Greenspan
succeeded in negotiating Stein's difficult thicket of repetitive words,
thoughts and ideas, sans machete, in both Composition, this by his
awesome memory alone, and Master-Pieces simply by reading.
With perfect timing, and his a "just right"
laying down of Stein words and rhythms – Stein's layered writing here
is akin to painting a picture – coupled with well-placed verbal stressings
and clever use of physical and facial movements, Greenspan was able
to bring Stein's very words alive.
Equally important, if not more, major meanings were
excavated, and thrown onto the table and into the light, so to speak.
While you had to be there to get the full blast of every
twist and turn – this review offers hints at Stein's profundity, and
slightly at that – below you will find a few paragraphs, out of context
which is the tail that wags the dog, that I culled from Stein two
lectures. Make of it what you will.
Also, directly below is a link to Janet Malcolm's 2013
New Yorker Essay on Gertrude Stein for those who want a general introduction
to Stein, her life and legacy. Filled with biases and hearsay aplenty,
it is still worth reading. Think of it as Gertrude 101.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/06/25/gertrude-steins-war
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| Gertrude Stein and Alice |
Composition as Explanation:
There is singularly nothing that makes a difference a difference in
beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation
has something different at which they are all looking. By this I mean
so simply that anybody knows it that composition is the difference
which makes each and all of them then different from other generations
and this is what makes everything different otherwise they are all
alike and everybody knows it because everybody says it.
It is very likely that nearly every one has been very nearly certain
that something that is interesting is interesting them. Can they and
do they. It is very interesting that nothing inside in them, that
is when you consider the very long history of how every one ever acted
or has felt, it is very interesting that nothing inside in them in
all of them makes it connectedly different.
By this I mean this. The only thing that is different from one time
to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody
is doing everything. This makes the thing we are looking at very different
and this makes what those who describe it make of it, it makes a composition,
it confuses, it shows, it is, it looks, it likes it as it is, and
this makes what is seen as it is seen. Nothing changes from generation
to generation except the thing seen and that makes a composition.
No one is ahead of his time; it is only that the particular variety
of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who also are
creating their own time refuse to accept. And they refuse to accept
it for a very simple reason and that is that they do not have to accept
it for any reason. They themselves that is everybody in their entering
the modern composition and they do enter it, if they do not enter
it they are not so to speak in it they are out of it and so they do
enter it. But in as you may say the non-competitive efforts where
if you are not in it nothing is lost except nothing at all except
what is not had, there are naturally all the refusals, and the things
refused are only important if unexpectedly somebody happens to need
them. In the case of the arts it is very definite. Those who are creating
the modern composition authentically are naturally only of importance
when they are dead because by that time the modern composition having
become past is classified and the description of it is classical.
That is the reason why the creator of the new composition in the arts
is an outlaw until he is a classic, there is hardly a moment in between
and it is really too bad very much too bad naturally for the creator
but also very much too bad for the enjoyer, they all really would
enjoy the created so much better just after it has been made than
when it is already a classic, but it is perfectly simple that there
is no reason why the contemporaries should see, because it would not
make any difference as they lead their lives in the new composition
anyway, and as every one is naturally indolent why naturally they
don't see.
What is a Master-piece and why are there so few of them?
One of the things that I discovered in lecturing was
that gradually one ceased to hear what one said one heard what the
audience hears one say, that is the reason that oratory is practically
never a master-piece very rarely and very rarely history, because
history deals with people who are orators who hear not what they are
not what they say but what their audience hears them say.
You can tell that so well in the difficulty of writing novels or poetry
these days. The tradition has always been that you may more or less
describe the things that happen you imagine them of course but you
more or less describe the things that happen but nowadays everybody
all day long knows what is happening and so what is happening is not
really interesting, one knows it by radios cinemas newspapers biographies
autobiographies until what is happening does not really thrill any
one, it excites them a little but it does not really thrill them.
The painter can no longer say that what he does is as the world looks
to him because he cannot look at the world any more, it has been photographed
too much and he has to say that he does something else. In former
times a painter said he painted what he saw of course he didn't but
anyway he could say it, now he does not want to say it because seeing
it is not interesting. This has something to do with masterpieces
and why there are so few of them but not everything.
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| Gertrude Stein |
The moment it is in relation it is common knowledge
and anybody can feel and know it and it is not a master-piece. At
the same time every one in a curious way sooner or later does feel
the reality of a master-piece. The thing in itself of which the human
nature is only its clothing does hold the attention. The manner and
habits of Bible times or Greek or Chinese have nothing to do with
ours today but the masterpieces exist just the same and they do not
exist because of their identity, that is what any one remembering
then remembered then, they do not exist by human nature because everybody
always knows everything there is to know about human nature, they
exist because they came to be as something that is an end in itself
and in that respect it is opposed to the business of living which
is relation and necessity. That is what a master-piece is not although
it may easily be what a master-piece talks about.
It is very interesting to have it be inside one that never as you
know yourself you know yourself without looking and feeling and looking
and feeling make it be that you are some one you have seen. If you
have seen any one you know them as you see them whether it is yourself
or any other one and so the identity consists in recognition and in
recognizing you lose identity because after all nobody looks as they
look like, they do not look like that we all know that of ourselves
and of any one. And therefore in every way it is a trouble and so
you write anybody does write to confirm what any one is and the more
one does the more one looks like what one was and in being so identity
is made more so and that identity is not what any one can have as
a thing to be but as a thing to see. And it being a thing to see no
master-piece can see what it can see if it does then it is timely
and as it is timely it is not a master-piece.
