A List

A List is a play by American writer Gertrude Stein, written in 1923 and first published in Operas and Plays in 1932.[1] It is structured in six parts, each labeled as a numbered or alphabetized "List," and has seven characters: Martha, Maryas, Marius, Mabel, Mary, Martin, and May. There are no explicit stage directions, but names in the side text are frequently joined with an ampersand or the word "and."[2] Stein said that the play was based on Avery Hopwood's play Our Little Wife (1916).[3]

For other uses, see A-list (disambiguation).

Synopsis

A list lost reminds her of a fire lost. Smoke is not black nor if you turn your back is a fire burned if you are near woods which abundantly supply wood.

Gertrude Stein, A List[4]

The play does not contain an easily discernible plot. However, pairings of characters and the accumulation of new characters suggest strained relationships between Martha and Maryas and between Mabel and Marius, and later a furtive relationship between Maryras and Mary. The language of marriage and separation, and of knowledge and travel, is frequently invoked.[5] Many allusions, including those to mountains, cows, and baskets, tie A List to other works by Stein,[6] as do techniques of Punning, repetition, and listing.[7][8][9]

Analysis

A List is considered to fall under the category of Stein's landscape plays.[10] In her lecture "Plays," Stein excerpts the play following an explanation of syncopated emotions:

I felt that if a play was exactly like a landscape then there would be no difficulty about the emotion of the person looking on at the play being behind or ahead of the play because the landscape does not have to make acquaintance. You may have to make acquaintance with it, but it does not with you, it is there and so the play being written the relation between you at any time is so exactly that that it is of no importance unless you look at it.[11]

Astrid Lorange analyzes Stein's landscape label as "a moment of performative definition, from which a particular kind of attention emerges: an attention to the relation of objects and events in a space of time."[12] Jane Palatini Bowers modifies the concept to further emphasize the topographical dimension. In her analysis of A List, she focuses on Stein's spatial play of language on the page itself, calling it a "lang-scape".[13]

Stein's strategies in the play include what Daniela Miranda identify as those she uses throughout her oeuvre "to construct the continuous present—recreation, using everything, insistence, and beginning again and again" and that "ultimately lead to a destabilization of normative time by denying the reader the possibility of closure, progress, and intelligibility."[14] Miranda's account extends the presentation of queerness from the content of the play to its structure as well.

Performance history

Student theatre company Cap & Bells mounted A List at Williams College in December 2016.[15]

No performances are listed in the appendices of Sarah Bay-Cheng's Mama Dada.[16]

Radio Free Stein workshopped the play in Amsterdam on August 12, 2017.[17]

Muhlenberg College Dept of Theater & Dance produced "A List" in April 2021, directed by James Peck and featuring Molly Menner as Martha and Savannah Connelly as Maryas.[18]

Further reading
  • Ryan, Betsy Alayne. 1984. Gertrude Stein's Theatre of the Absolute. Theater and Dramatic Studies Ser., 21. Ann Arbor and London: UMI Research Press. ISBN 0-8357-2021-7.
  • Stein, Gertrude. 1932. Operas and Plays. Barrytown NY: Station Hill Arts, 1998. ISBN 1-886449-16-3.

References
  1. Dydo, Ulla E. (1993). A Stein reader. Northwestern University Press. pp. 382–383. ISBN 081011058X. OCLC 28584093.
  2. Dydo, Ulla E. (1993). A Stein reader. Northwestern University Press. pp. 383. ISBN 081011058X. OCLC 28584093. As Stein couples and groups names vertically and joins words horizontally, she plays with the configuration of plays, thinking of them as beginning with lists.
  3. Dydo, Ulla E. (1993). A Stein reader. Northwestern University Press. pp. 382. ISBN 081011058X. OCLC 28584093. In the spring of 1923 Carl Van Vechten showed A List to Edmund Wilson, who wanted to publish it in Vanity Fair on facing pages with Hopwood's Our Little Wife (1916), which Stein had told him was the source.
  4. Dydo, Ulla E. (1993). A Stein reader. Northwestern University Press. pp. 401. ISBN 081011058X. OCLC 28584093.
  5. Dydo, Ulla E. (1993). A Stein reader. Northwestern University Press. pp. 382. ISBN 081011058X. OCLC 28584093. The innumerable couplings in both A List and Our Little Wife echo [Mabel Dodge's] many divorces and remarriages.
  6. Fifer, Elizabeth (1979). "Is Flesh Advisable? The Interior Theater of Gertrude Stein". Signs. 4 (3): 472–483. doi:10.1086/493632. JSTOR 3173395. S2CID 144322260.
  7. Astrid., Lorange (2014). How Reading Is Written: a Brief Index to Gertrude Stein. Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 978-0819575111. OCLC 894789605.
  8. Dydo, Ulla E. (2003). Gertrude Stein: the language that rises: 1923-1934. Northwestern University Press. ISBN 0810119196. OCLC 50960856.
  9. Miranda, Daniela (2015). "The Queer Temporality of Gertrude Stein's Continuous Present". Gender Forum (54).
  10. Boje, David M. (June 23, 2005). "Gertrude Stein's Absolute Theatre".
  11. Patricia, Meyerowitz (2004). Look at me now and here I am: writings and lectures, 1911-1945. Peter Owen. ISBN 0720612012. OCLC 51993948.
  12. Astrid., Lorange (2014). How Reading Is Written: a Brief Index to Gertrude Stein. Wesleyan University Press. p. 114. ISBN 978-0819575111. OCLC 894789605.
  13. Bowers, Jane Palatini (1991). "They watch me as they watch this": Gertrude Stein's metadrama. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 0812230574. OCLC 23212389.
  14. Miranda, Daniela (2015). "The Queer Temporality of Gertrude Stein's Continuous Present". Gender Forum (54): 30.
  15. "A List". Cap and Bells. 2017-02-09. Retrieved 2017-06-17.
  16. Bay-Cheng, Sarah (2004). Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein's avant-garde theater. Routledge. ISBN 9780415977234. OCLC 52341515.
  17. "Production History". Radio Free Stein.
  18. "Gertrude Stein's eccentric 'A List' provides lens to explore our surreal moment in history". Muhlenberg College. April 8, 2021.
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