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In the more than 75 plays Gertrude Stein wrote between 1913 and 1946, she envisioned a new dramaturgy, beginning with the pictorial conception of a play as a landscape. She drew into her plays the daily flow of life around her - including the natural world - and turned cities, villages, parts of the dramatic structure, and even her own friends into characters. She made punctuation and typography part of her compositional style and chose words for their joyful impact as sound and wordplay. For Stein, the writing process itself was always important in developing the continuous present at the heart of her work.
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pittsburgh USA in 1874, 150 years ago this year. In 1902, she left America for Paris with her brother Leo. Their home at 27 Rue de Fleurus, near the Luxembourg Gardens, became an important centre of the modernist movement. In 1907 Stein met her wife Alice B. Toklas and their life as lovers, supporters, collectors, adventurers and publishers would endure until Stein's death in 1946. Gertrude and Alice befriended and supported the young Picasso, acquiring many of his paintings and the work of his contemporaries, Matisse and Gaugin. By the time they had finished, they had created one of the most important collections of modern French painting in the world. Most importantly of all, Gertrude Stein reimagined what writing could be and how language itself might be used, inspiring generations of writers including Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson. Gertrude Stein was a masculine, openly lesbian woman who lived her life on her own terms; good-natured, idiosyncratic, brilliant. Her last words were: 'What is the answer?' When she received no reply from Alice, she simply laughed and said, 'Then what is the question?'
Zusammenfassung
This volume contains a collection of Stein's works. It also includes her essay "Plays", in which she reflects on the experience in the theatre of seeing and hearing, and on emotion and time. She envisioned a new dramaturgy, beginning with the pictorial conception of a play as a landscape.
