This landmark collection brings back into print Gertrude Stein’s radical, genre-defying theatrical exercises from the 1920s and early 1930s. Stripping the stage bare of traditional plot structures, linear timelines, and conventional character development, Stein reimagines drama as a pure topography of language, rhythm, and sound. The volume compiles twenty-two experimental pieces, featuring her celebrated collaboration with composer Virgil Thomson, Four Saints in Three Acts, alongside deeply personal, coded explorations of same-sex domesticity like A Lyrical Opera Made By Two. Accompanied by an insightful introduction by literary biographer James R. Mellow, this collection preserves Stein’s subversion of theatrical norms and her enduring contribution to modern queer modernism.
Details
| ISBN: 9781886449169 |
| Subtitle: |
| Genre: Literary Collections; Play |
| Subject(s): Literary Collections |
| Publication Date: 2010-01-01 |
| Original Publication Date: |
| Publisher: Station Hill Press |
| Language: English |
| Format: Paperback |
| Pages: 412 |
| Rating: |
| Notes: Operas & Plays (originally self-published in 1932 as a ‘Plain Edition’; reissued as a paperback/facsimile edition by Station Hill Press in 1987 with an introduction by James R. Mellow) is a seminal non-fiction/literary collection of avant-garde theater. The text explicitly chronicles and analyzes experimental dramatic forms, language abstraction, and same-sex partnerships, incorporating foundational queer pieces such as A Lyrical Opera Made By Two (1928), which directly mirrors Stein’s domestic and romantic relationship with her lifelong partner, Alice B. Toklas. |
| Book_ID: 107923 |