Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a typical quote from Gertrude Stein, who was famous for her love of word play and experimental language.
Stein was a mentor to Ernest Hemingway, who credited Stein with coining the term Lost Generation, which defined the generation of youth who lived through the devastation and aftermath of the First World War.
Stein was known for her literary salons that attracted American expatriate writers to her home in the Left Bank in Paris during the first half of the 20th century. But Stein also produced an extraordinary amount of poetry, essays and books, including more than 80 plays.
Her plays are considered unproducible due to their absurdist nature, but UBC professor Adam Frank, composer Dorothy Chang and director Adam Henderson are attempting to produce the unproducible with a concert staging and interactive workshop of Steins For the Country Entirely. A Play in Letters, presented by Western Front New Music on May 3.
Frank has been fascinated with Stein for years and making recordings of her work as part of his Radio Free Stein project.
There is something about her prose style that lets me breath, Frank said. This writing seemed very interesting and had a tempo that interested me. I wanted to understand where this writing came from and how could someone come up with the idea to do a form of writing that didnt make any narrative sense.
Henderson and Chang are working with four actors and four musicians in a way that serves Steins experimental writing, which turned 19th century narrative and linear literary conventions on its head by using language in an idiosyncratic, playful, repetitive and humorous way.
A lot of what she was doing was looking for different ways of communicating that are not on the surface. [In a way] she was making plays about relationships, said Henderson.
Frank describes the production as a conversation play, where the audience witnesses a conversation between several characters.
In the 18th century, a novel told in the form of letters was called an epistolary novel, so [Stein] thought why dont we do an epistolary play? Which makes no sense why would you do a play in letters? Frank said.
However, letters played a significant role in Steins life, particularly during the First World War when she fled Paris for Majorca off the coast Spain.
While she is there, letter writing becomes important to stay in contact with friends, Frank points out. Letters, it turns out, are important for women writers at the time they are one of the forms of writing that women can participate in in a public way.
For the Country Entirely: A Play in Letters is the first in the series of musical dramatic adaptations for Radio Free Stein and is part of A Biocultural Hinge: Theorizing Affect and Emotion Across the Disciplines, an international roundtable hosted by the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Study at UBC.
The production features actors Kurt Evans, Lucia Frangione, Cara McDowell and Alan Marriott, and musicians Mark Ferris and Domagov Ivanovic on violin, Marcus Takizawa on viola and Rebecca Wenham on cello. More information at front.bc.ca.
