http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.0747 - Joseph Cermatori <joseph.cermatori@gmail.com> - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 8:31:02 AM - IP Address:69.22.245.46 Unsettling Gertrude Stein: On the Citability of Baroque Gesture in Four Saints in Three Acts JOSEPH CERMATORI This article focuses on Gertrude Stein’s 1927 opera Four Saints in Three Acts, which takes a pair of baroque saints for its protagonists and which debuted in a 1934 production replete with deliberate citations of baroque stage design, gesture, and visual art – details that have gone almost entirely unacknowledged in the past several decades’ scholarship on Stein. It recovers these forgotten production details by juxtaposing a reading of Stein’s text and performance theories with Walter Benjamin’s vision of baroque theatre as articulated in The Origin of German Trauerspiel. Interpreting Stein’s methods within the frame of baroque theatrical allegory, it suggests Stein’s situation within a larger tradition of baroque modernism. It argues that Stein found, within the concept of the baroque, a productive means of challenging norms of representation across a wide array of registers – linguistic, aesthetic, sexual, racial, and historiographic. ABSTRACT: KEYWORDS: Gertrude Stein, Walter Benjamin, baroque theatre, gesture, allegory, citationality, Four Saints in Three Acts Opening on Broadway to great acclaim after its brief debut at a regional art museum in Hartford, Connecticut, Four Saints in Three Acts (written 1927, premiered 1934) was Gertrude Stein’s first and only dramatic text to receive a major production during her lifetime. A foundational work of avant-garde theatre and opera in the United States, its premiere occurred amid the earliest art-historical re-evaluations of seventeenth-century Italian visual art by American curators and collectors. The present article argues that this contemporaneous interest in the historical baroque period, far from being merely fortuitous or coincidental, actively shaped the conception, performance, and reception of Four Saints in Three Acts. With its counter-reformation-era protagonists, Teresa of Ávila and Ignatius of Loyola, deployed as allegories for the modern-day artist’s life, Four Saints demonstrably undertakes a direct dialogue with the conventions of baroque theatrical representation. This © University of Toronto doi: 10.3138/md.0747 http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.0747 - Joseph Cermatori <joseph.cermatori@gmail.com> - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 8:31:02 AM - IP Address:69.22.245.46 JOSEPH CERMATORI dialogue was centrally important to the project’s collaborators and recognizable to its 1934 audience, but it has gone largely unnoticed in subsequent theatre scholarship, which has focused instead on questions of poetics, antitheatricality, gender, sexuality, or Stein’s place within a larger avant-garde context.1 Reconsidering Stein as a modern inheritor of the baroque legacy stands to reframe her involvement with all these various questions and cast her in a new light altogether. But what accounts for this critical and discursive lacuna, for the silence of Stein’s interpreters when it comes to her investments in baroque culture? Why has Stein’s baroque remained so largely unintelligible to scholars of performance history, when it was so abundantly apparent to her contemporaries? This article explores how Stein’s Four Saints finds within the idea of the baroque a means to contest norms of representation across a wide array of registers – linguistic, aesthetic, sexual, racial, and not least of all, historiographic. Beyond merely representing the lives of saints, Stein’s text stages a vision of temporal movement and historical unfolding. Its premiere performance explicitly cited and iterated historical gestures, forms, and images, thereby re-enacting theatrically an entire repertoire of baroque theatre itself, transmitting that repertoire and history forth bodily into the production’s modernist moment and beyond.2 Thus, Four Saints in Three Acts can be understood as both a work of theatre and a work of historiography, a work whose material content is history itself, as is the case with Walter Benjamin’s exemplary object of the baroque, the German Trauerspiel or “mourning play.”3 As an allegory of canonization (Blackmer 327), Four Saints uses text and performance alike to reimagine both baroque theatre and baroque history, staging historical movement as repetition, play, iteration, and recursion in which the obscurity of baroque theatre forms can be exhumed and re-cited in a new (modernist, American) context. Four Saints thus figures historical “progress” as an iterative, citational process. In what follows, I unfold numerous important aspects of Stein’s text in relation to the concept and cultural memory of the baroque during the 1920s, drawing on a reading of Benjamin’s Origin of German Trauerspiel (published in 1928) to identify the most salient affinities between Stein’s theatre and the theatrical traditions of seventeenthcentury Europe. Along the way, I also raise a set of questions about the baroque’s notional capacity to enfold affective modes of gaiety alongside queer forms of sexuality, desire, and affiliation. In so doing, I argue for rethinking Stein’s miracle play as a paradigmatic and uniquely American example of what can be described as “baroque modernism,” a pattern of having to look back to the past and to early modernity specifically in order to advance the pursuit of the new. 348 Modern Drama 58:3 (2015) http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.0747 - Joseph Cermatori <joseph.cermatori@gmail.com> - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 8:31:02 AM - IP Address:69.22.245.46 Baroque Gesture in Four Saints in Three Acts BAROQUE FANTASIA: CONCEPTUAL BACKGROUND AND PERFORMANCE CONTEXT At the Wadsworth Atheneum’s 1934 premiere of Four Saints in Three Acts in Hartford, spectators received a program whose frontispiece featured a photo reproduction of Bernini’s Saint Teresa in Ecstasy, alongside the text of a hymn, “Upon the Book and Picture of the Seraphical Saint Teresa,” written by the man seen, at the time, as the most baroque of the English metaphysical poets, Richard Crashaw (1613–49) (see e.g., Eliot, “Crashaw”). This juxtaposition of Stein’s work with documents of baroque literary and visual culture was far from arbitrary. It reflects, at least partially, the interests of the Atheneum’s young director and Four Saints’s de facto producer, A.E. “Chick” Austin (1900–57), who specialized jointly in seventeenth-century Italian painting and European modernism and who had curated the first major US exhibition of Italian baroque paintings, in 1930 (Gaddis 132–37). Even prior to Austin’s involvement, however, Stein and her primary collaborator, the composer Virgil Thomson, had chosen to focus the opera on Saints Teresa of Avila4 and Ignatius of Loyola, whose ecstatic visions were, even then, understood to have helped inspire the programmatic use of spectacle as propaganda within the Catholic counter-reformation. Thomson’s account of how the choice of subjects came about is particularly evocative: The theme we chose was of my suggesting; it was the working artist’s life, which is to say, the life we both were living . . . I thought we should follow overtly, however, the format of classical Italian opera, which carries on the commerce of the play in dry recitative, extending the emotional moments into arias and set-pieces. And since the eighteenth-century opera seria, or basic Italian opera, required a serious mythological subject with a tragic ending, we agreed to follow that convention also, but to consider mythology as including not just Greek or Scandinavian legends, of which there were already a great many in operatic repertory, but also political history and the lives of saints. Gertrude liked American history, but every theme we tried out seemed to have something wrong with it. So that after I vetoed George Washington because of eighteenth century costumes (in which everybody looks alike), we gave up history and chose saints, sharing a certain reserve toward medieval ones and Italian ones on the grounds that both had been overdone in the last century. Eventually our saints turned out to be baroque and Spanish, a solution that delighted Gertrude, for she loved Spain, and that was far from displeasing to me, since, as I pointed out, mass-market Catholic art, the basic living art of Christianity, was still baroque. And Maurice Grosser [Thomson’s lover, the landscape painter, poet, and Four Saints’s scenarist] was later to remind us that musical instruments of the violin family still present themselves as functional baroque forms. (qtd. in Dydo 176–77) Modern Drama 58:3 (2015) 349 http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.0747 - Joseph Cermatori <joseph.cermatori@gmail.com> - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 8:31:02 AM - IP Address:69.22.245.46 JOSEPH CERMATORI From this description, it is clear that the initial conceptual discussions for the opera had centred, not only upon the baroque setting of its saintly protagonists, but also on a number of ways in which the baroque could make a fitting conceptual touchstone for the work. The collaboration would develop techniques of baroque recitative, elaborate upon the structures of eighteenthcentury baroque opera seria, reprise the mythological thematics found in early opera (and Wagner), and – perhaps most importantly of all – take advantage of the variegated and flamboyant costumes of the period, as opposed to the bland uniformity of Enlightenment- and Revolutionary-era clothing. But it is Grosser’s comment (as recollected here by Thomson) on the historical persistence of baroque form within the physical bodies of modern string instruments that best informs the opera’s conceptual gambit. The bodies of these objects, into which history itself has sunk or merged, exemplify just one of many ways in which the baroque is something other than absolutely past. Instead, in Four Saints, the baroque past becomes something materially and continuously present, if in subtly transformed ways. Stein’s attachment to Spain during this time was due in some measure to her friendship with Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris and to fond memories of her “golden summer of 1912,” spent with Alice B. Toklas touring Madrid, Toledo, Barcelona, and Saint Teresa’s hometown of Ávila, where the two visited the ornate, seventeenth-century shrine dedicated to the Saint’s honour in her official chapel (Watson 44). She also harboured an interest in what Thomson describes as the still baroque status of “mass-market Catholic art” (qtd. in Dydo 177) and drew inspiration for the opera from her experiences as a flâneur in the streets of Paris, encountering objects of Catholic kitsch for sale in various vitrines during her walks around the city. Glimpsed through the window of a photography studio in the Boulevard Raspail, a series of photographs featuring a young girl’s street clothes gradually transforming into a nun’s habit became an inspiration for one of the libretto’s most memorable moments, the photographing of Saint Teresa. Elsewhere, in the Rue de Rennes, a group of porcelain statuettes, representing a young soldier showing charity to a beggar, offered her an image for the militancy and grace of Saint Ignatius of Loyola (see Stein, “Plays” li). It was among these fragmentary allegories of modernity – the architectural remains of baroque church architecture in Spain, the trace of baroque emblematics hidden ruinously within commodity souvenirs – that Stein’s modernist-baroque sensibility took shape. Beyond these touchstones, Four Saints’s 1934 audience would have been confronted with the bizarre spectacle of Florine Stettheimer’s scenery, described by Eugene Gaddis, in terms echoed by numerous others (Watson, Harris, Van Vechten), as having been executed in a “whimsical baroque style” (186). Stettheimer draped the stage with blue cellophane that collected 350 Modern Drama 58:3 (2015) http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.0747 - Joseph Cermatori <joseph.cermatori@gmail.com> - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 8:31:02 AM - IP Address:69.22.245.46 Baroque Gesture in Four Saints in Three Acts Figure 1: Four Saints in Three Acts at its premiere performance, March 1934, Hartford, CT; courtesy of the Florine and Ettie Stettheimer Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. in shimmering folds everywhere. In framing the symmetrical placement of bodies onstage, these folds drew attention to the converging orthogonal vectors of the stage, recalling the use of forced visual perspective and spatial recessiveness that has been the hallmark of baroque stage design, at least since the construction of the Teatro Olimpico in 1585. Maurice Grosser observed that the stage looked like “a Schrafft’s candy-box version of Baroque” (qtd. in Watson 225). Stettheimer’s costumes cited baroque visual culture in similar ways. The opera’s two Saint Teresas appeared in its opening act wearing matching cardinal-red cassocks, their heads crowned with lace mantillas and wide-brimmed straw hats that gave them the appearance of wearing haloes (Harris 109). Similarly suggestive and strange, Saint Ignatius of Loyola made his first appearance in a cassock of bright green moire. Almost all the actors changed costumes at each of the production’s three entr’actes, creating a veritable pageant of constantly shifting colour, full of blues, greens, reds, and other lavish hues. In the words of David Harris, “The sheer number of costumes – approximately two hundred in an opera that ran only one hundred minutes – contributed to the baroque richness of the spectacle” (109). Modern Drama 58:3 (2015) 351 http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.0747 - Joseph Cermatori <joseph.cermatori@gmail.com> - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 8:31:02 AM - IP Address:69.22.245.46 JOSEPH CERMATORI Figure 2: Four Saints in Three Acts at its premiere performance, March 1934, Hartford, CT; courtesy of the Florine and Ettie Stettheimer Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The actors’ use of gesture and stage movement comported with the design’s baroque concept. As Thomson wrote to Stein in 1933, the production used the performers’ bodies to conjure the “magnificence” of “classic religious painting and sculpture” (208). He charged the British dancer Frederick Ashton with choreographing a repertoire of gestures for the entirety of the spectacle (Watson 236–39). Ashton brought to the task a familiarity with Catholic ritual attained from having spent his childhood in Lima, Peru, where he served as an acolyte to the city’s cardinal archbishop, assisted with masses in its grand cathedral, and witnessed countless street processions like the one he staged for the opera’s climax. Working with the scenario composed by Grosser to organize Stein’s libretto into “a train of images” (qtd. in Harris 111), Ashton arranged the performers’ bodies into a series of tableaux vivants, alternating between continuity of movement and the sort of momentary frozenness that allows a gesture to settle. Eschewing the fourth wall almost entirely, he opted frequently for the outwardly facing presentational style associated with the flattened frontality of allegorical theatre in the seventeenth century (Benjamin, Origin 125, 186; see also Harris 121–28). From the auditorium, 352 Modern Drama 58:3 (2015) http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.0747 - Joseph Cermatori <joseph.cermatori@gmail.com> - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 8:31:02 AM - IP Address:69.22.245.46 Baroque Gesture in Four Saints in Three Acts Carl Van Vechten perceived that Ashton’s gestures were developed primarily in response to the tradition of baroque painting – particularly El Greco, Franciso de Zurbarán, and Diego Velázquez – and he made this connection overt in an essay later printed in the Broadway production’s souvenir program. Another viewer, the Jesuit priest and sometime critic John La Farge, Jr., went even further in a review in the Jesuit weekly America (17 February 1934). There, La Farge claimed Stein’s prevailing idea is that of a “baroque fantasia,”5 one in which she wishes to convey to the spectator and hearer the vague general impression of how baroque appears to her; of what she particularly loves in baroque; its contained grandeur; its dignity of high noon and blue skies. But this is not done too seriously. It is ironical; seriously ironical or ironically serious . . . She conveys too, in a strange way, the impression that a spiritually illiterate person receives from the accidentals of the Catholic liturgy. To such a person, the chanted lessons of the Church, the intonations and movements, appear solemn yet inconsequential grave announcements of the inexplicable. Not that she resents this; she enjoys it, as the most precious element in the baroque. Her attitude toward it is of interest; of pleasure; possibly of something deeper, a sense that there is something profound and meaningful beneath these forms. So with an immense number of moderns; a nostalgia for something they have lost. Yet she remains slightly ironical. St. Teresa and St. Ignatius are but symbols of this something in the baroque which lifts it above a gorgeous garden party. They are the foci of baroque dignity, restraint, expansiveness. They are vaguely reminiscent of a vaguely apprehended period: agreeable figures. (qtd. in Stein and Thomson, Letters 227–28n) Four Saints evinces a sincere love for the idea of the baroque and enjoyment or interest or pleasure in its grandeur, dignity, restraint, and expansiveness; but there is also something “seriously ironical or ironically serious” about the attitude it takes toward the baroque tradition. The constellation of these affects – genuine admiration and nostalgia on one hand, and a “slightly ironical” stance on the other – reaches what appears as a point of undecidability in La Farge’s assessment of the work, which gauges both Stein’s closeness to the baroque and her apparent distance from it. Helping measure this distance even more exactly, Ashton’s choreography went beyond his childhood encounters with forms of Latin American baroque mestizaje to include numerous contemporary social dances from Harlem’s thriving nightlife scene, such as Snake Hips and the Charleston (Harris 124–25). Although Four Saints had ostensibly been written for white performers, Thomson hit upon the idea of an entirely black cast one evening while watching Jimmie Daniels perform at The Hot-Cha Bar and Grill in Harlem in 1933 (Watson 199). Although born Modern Drama 58:3 (2015) 353 http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.0747 - Joseph Cermatori <joseph.cermatori@gmail.com> - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 8:31:02 AM - IP Address:69.22.245.46 JOSEPH CERMATORI as much from a spirit of racial fetishism as anything else, this casting permitted Ashton to draw the Lindy Hop and other black social dance forms into the mix and thereby to develop Four Saints’s choreographic vocabulary at the productive conjunction of “blackness and baroque” (Harris 130). ALLEGORICAL TEMPORALITY AND HISTORY In the year immediately following the production’s premiere and subsequent transfer to Broadway, Stein would compose her only sustained theoretical treatise on the theatre, a 1935 lecture called “Plays.” As a reflection on the dramaturgy of Four Saints and a philosophical inquiry into the nature of time itself, the essay commences with the following oft-cited observation about spectatorship: The thing that is fundamental about plays is that the scene as depicted on the stage is more often than not one might say it is almost always in syncopated time in relation to the emotion of anybody in the audience. ... Your sensation as one in the audience in relation to the play played before you your sensation I say your emotion concerning that play is always either behind or ahead of the play at which you are looking and to which you are listening. So your emotion as a member of the audience is never going on at the same time as the action of the play. This that the thing seen and the thing felt about the thing seen not going on at the same tempo is what makes the being at the theatre something that makes anybody nervous. (xxix–xxx) Stein’s essay makes clear that the nervousness she feels in being temporally out of joint at the theatre is part of a larger situation that finds her feeling similarly out of joint with the temporality of everyday existence. She claims that the syncopated rhythm that arises from one’s sense of non-simultaneity with any given event in daily life is experienced, not as a nervousness from which one seeks “relief,” as in the theatre, but as an “excitement” that seems to culminate in a sense of “completion” (xxxii). The experience of being absolutely present to an event is crucially just as unavailable outside the theatre, in everyday life. With exciting events taking place outside the theatre, claims Stein,“There one progresses forward and back emotionally,” just as one might do in a theatre audience, shuttling back and forth through syncopated time, but “at the supreme crisis of the scene the scene in which one takes part, in which one’s hopes and loves and fears take part at the extreme crisis of this thing one is almost one with one’s emotions” (xxxiii; emphasis added). This almost one is an important nuance in Stein’s theory. Things feel 354 Modern Drama 58:3 (2015) http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.0747 - Joseph Cermatori <joseph.cermatori@gmail.com> - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 8:31:02 AM - IP Address:69.22.245.46 Baroque Gesture in Four Saints in Three Acts immediate and present in everyday life, even if they aren’t actually or totally so. The theatrical medium is anxiogenic for Stein, inasmuch as it exposes, like a rebus, the mediated and temporally syncopated quality of time as it is experienced in everyday life, which opposes itself to the theatre. In the evocative terms offered by performance theorist Rebecca Schneider, herself drawing upon Stein’s vocabulary of syncopation, the theatre is the medium by which the theatricality of time itself is touched (6). There is a larger baroque philosophy of history implicit in this theory of syncopated, theatrical temporality. It is notably similar and closely related to the philosophy of history Benjamin sees reflected in the concept of origin that he associated with the baroque: “a process of restoration and reestablishment” in which “singularity and repetition [are] conditioned by one another in all essentials” (Origin 45–46). For Stein – like the authors of the baroque Trauerspiele, in Benjamin’s assessment – events take place temporally, with an intrinsic susceptibility to repetition and play, and thus, they possess a peculiar theatrical quality. But just as Stein shares the baroque’s characteristic predisposition toward understanding time, in both its everyday and historical senses, as cyclical and theatrical, so too does her writing incorporate the possibility of difference or revision within repetition.6 Stein’s concept of repetition, signally articulated in her 1935 essay “Portraits and Repetition,” echoes Benjamin’s concept of origin, in which singularity and repetition condition each other mutually. There, she takes up the eminently philosophical question of whether repetition is possible, asserting that what we typically consider repetition must instead be understood as insistence, in which each new iteration differs slightly from those before and after it as a result of its new context (166–67). It is as a form of emphatic insistence that Stein’s writing (re)turns upon itself so regularly, as in the much-parodied line from her 1913 poem, “Sacred Emily,” “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” (187). This sentence is a statement of identity that immediately calls into question what identity is when it is necessarily constituted through repetition and self-difference. Like Benjamin’s baroque allegorists, Stein always takes this fact of self-difference as her point of departure: the self-identical wholeness of things has always already been ruined. Stein believed “that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years” (qtd. in Wilder, Introduction vi).7 In revivifying the rose’s lost redness, Stein’s insistent repetition aims at an almost Shklovskyan defamiliarization, the kind that rescues, for the stone, its forgotten stoniness. Frequently deploying repetition as a bulwark against oblivion in this way, Stein’s writing can thus be said to register an acute awareness of the ephemerality of phenomena when they are subject to the ruinations of time. In response, her poetics sought to establish what she described as a Modern Drama 58:3 (2015) 355 http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.0747 - Joseph Cermatori <joseph.cermatori@gmail.com> - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 8:31:02 AM - IP Address:69.22.245.46 JOSEPH CERMATORI “continuous present” (“Composition” 524). Stein’s concept of presence should not be confused with a more traditionally theological concept of Being as eternal presence; rather, it is closer to the grammatical form of the present continuous tense or the present participle, whose form appears repeatedly throughout Four Saints, as in the bizarrely non-sequitur textual fragment, “Saint Teresa Advancing” (Four Saints 449). In cases such as this, an action becomes an image, a gesture: a figure is caught in the medial noman’s-land between two positions and two moments, at once frozen and part of a continual unfolding. This differential and immanent (infinitesimal) between is where the continuous present is to be sought, not in the transcendent realm of (transfinite) sempiternity.8 (As the play reminds us, “There is a difference between Barcelona and Avila. / There is a difference between Barcelona” [471].) The temporal unfolding of the continuous present thus takes place as a kind of suspension of presence, a betweenness, and within this liminal position, Stein seeks refuge from the torments of being either ahead of or behind theatrically syncopated time, precisely by becoming both ahead and behind at once. Theatricality is a privileged medium for effecting this paradoxical, suspended form of presence and, specifically, the theatricality of the baroque stage, reconceived anew. Four Saints’s dramaturgy itself bespeaks the most salient connection. In terms that strikingly recall Benjamin’s claim that baroque theatre gave material form to a philosophical view of history as merging into the scene or setting of the natural world,9 “Plays” describes how Stein wants to merge theatrical time into natural landscape: 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. ... The landscape has it [sic] formation and as after all a play has to have formation and be in relation one thing to the other thing and as the story is not the thing as any one is always telling something then the landscape not moving but being always in relation, the trees to the hills the hills to the fields the trees to each other any piece of it to any sky and then any detail to any other detail . . . In Four Saints I made the Saints the landscape. (xl, xliv) In Four Saints, as in baroque Trauerspiel, time becomes space, merging uncannily into the setting. Four Saints is not organized around an Aristotelian plot that imitates action but instead uses the theatre to present a plot in the spatial sense of the term: a plot of land. Set in some saintly realm, apart from 356 Modern Drama 58:3 (2015) http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.0747 - Joseph Cermatori <joseph.cermatori@gmail.com> - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 8:31:02 AM - IP Address:69.22.245.46 Baroque Gesture in Four Saints in Three Acts normative conceptions of time, the events of the plot do not progress causally. Nothing really can be said to happen in Four Saints. As drama, it takes place in an entirely different way. Just as baroque allegory, in Benjamin’s view, insists that “[a]ny person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else” (Origin 175), in Stein’s theatre every detail can be situated in a relationship of significance, at least potentially, to every other detail (trees–hills–fields–trees–sky). The landscape of saints hardly moves, but the constellation of figures within it continuously shifts position, just as a breeze through any natural prospect might be seen to send tree limbs and leaves fluttering. Like the emblems of baroque allegory as described by Benjamin, in which the movement of time appears caught within a static image, Stein’s landscape incorporates into itself an internal dialectic of stasis and imminent movement. As Stein says, the landscape of Four Saints “moves but it also stays” (“Plays” lii). Harris has suggested that Ashton’s baroque choreography might have given Stein the idea for this sense of movement in stasis (130), and clearly, gestures must also take a place as allegorical components of Stein’s landscape. Like a landscape, a gesture moves but also stays; it is, as Benjamin reminds us, an image of movement interrupted. In a gesture, movement must compose itself and settle into an image, however fleetingly, before continuing. Numerous eyewitnesses to the premiere (especially La Farge, who felt like “a spiritually illiterate person” watching a Tridentine mass) said that the performance unfolded as a landscape of gestures that varied continually.10 For such a spectator, one cannot get beyond the performance as a constellation of foreign visual and auditory media to some transcendent truth that might linger tantalizingly “behind” it. Its various gestural signifiers all suggest a mimetic referent, but that referent has receded to a point of inaccessibility. Mimesis, a gesture pointing to a beyond, has become abyssal. It has been replaced with metatheatre and mime, gestures pointing back, inward, self-referentially. Thus, Four Saints presents its audience with hieroglyphics like those, according to Benjamin, that faced the spectator of allegorical baroque Trauerspiel. Four Saints’s spectators and readers are confronted with a crisis of interpretability, in which language, gesture, and every other material element of performance are rendered hermeneutically obscure and become, in themselves, enigmatic objects for contemplation. But if Benjamin’s baroque spectators observed the allegorical gestures of Trauerspiel with a mixture of mournfulness and “satisfaction” (Origin 119), Stein supposedly responds to this crisis with what both she and La Farge describe as “pleasure” (“Plays” xlii). Thus, the vision of the baroque that Four Saints conjures is one that seeks to transform mournfulness miraculously into gaiety.11 Modern Drama 58:3 (2015) 357 http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.0747 - Joseph Cermatori <joseph.cermatori@gmail.com> - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 8:31:02 AM - IP Address:69.22.245.46 JOSEPH CERMATORI READING FOUR SAINTS WITH BENJAMIN In Four Saints in Three Acts, the time of All Saints Day merges with the space of the stage (Blackmer 332). The reader or spectator who expects Stein’s play to focus upon only four saints is treated instead to forty-four (the number given in Thomson’s score) or perhaps even more, a veritable panorama of saints. The saints proliferate endlessly with a kind of horror vacui: their final summation seems infinitely deferred. They lack any sense of stable individuation. “Can two saints be one,” the text asks. It is a laconic, ambiguous query, which Stein characteristically frames as a simple, declarative sentence, ending in a period rather than a question mark. Elsewhere, one saint seems to become two – as in “How many are there halving” (449) and “Saint Teresa with Saint Teresa . . . Saint Teresa and Saint Teresa” (457–58) – or even three – “Saint Teresa and Saint Teresa and Saint Teresa” (448). In Thomson’s musical setting, there are two Saint Teresas, in constant dialogue and harmony with each other. The saints merge, multiply, and divide mitotically in ways that are unstageable in traditional theatrical terms. Similarly, in the manner of Stein’s other dramatic writing, the text famously leaves uncertain the total number of performers needed, the speaker/singer of each line, the difference between spoken/sung text and other “paratextual” inscriptions (speech prefixes, stage directions, act and scene indications, and the like), and also its total number of acts. Its title promises Four Saints in Three Acts, a phrase that itself suggests an irregular, asymmetrical, brocaded structure, as off-centre as a non-spheroid baroque pearl. As the play proceeds, however, the number of acts and scenes varies continually. This play, like Stein’s others, does not progress causally and chronologically from an initial first act to subsequent second, third, and fourth acts. Over its first few pages alone, the libretto gives the following indications, in this order: “Act I,” “Repeat First Act,” “Enact end of an act,” “Act Two,” “Act One,” “Act Two,” and on and on. Perhaps exasperated by all this numerical play, the text itself asks, midway through, somewhat impatiently, “How much of it is finished” (461) and “How many acts are there in it” (478). In Stein’s landscape, these acts and their corresponding titles are uncoupled from any chronological ordering of temporal events. Instead, they proliferate dizzyingly, just as Stein’s saints seem to do, marking the passage of time while also mocking the notion of chronology. Their effect is to transform the characteristic nervousness that chronology can elicit into the playful feeling of being repeatedly suspended “between” punctuating moments. If time does not progress in Four Saints, neither is it perfectly immobile. The saints are idle, leisurely, as though at a garden party or salon, but they are not entirely static. Rather, they are caught between stasis and flux, both fixed and in motion. Stein highlights this processual quality with lines that allude frequently to the characters caught somewhere between two states, as 358 Modern Drama 58:3 (2015) http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.0747 - Joseph Cermatori <joseph.cermatori@gmail.com> - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 8:31:02 AM - IP Address:69.22.245.46 Baroque Gesture in Four Saints in Three Acts in the opera’s opening, emblematic image of “Saint Teresa half in and half out of doors” (445). Here Stein captures a literal image of liminality itself: the image of the saint caught in the limen of a doorframe, an image echoed in other freeze-frame images in motion throughout the text, as in the enigmatic fragments of text “Saint Teresa about to be” (446), “Saint Teresa in moving” (447), and “Saint Teresa has begun to be in act one” (453). Elsewhere the text catches the figures in the fold between two incommensurable gestures or positions, as in a long passage near the opera’s beginning that depicts Teresa somewhere between sitting and standing and surrounded and not surrounded at various sequential instances through a kind of constant montage (446–47). Here the effect is of an unsettling – a sudden folding and unfolding, as when a piece of cloth at rest is ruffled violently or in Bernini’s ecstatic depiction of the saint – and, indeed, “Saint Teresa seated and not surrounded might be very well inclined to be settled” (447). Like Benjamin’s allegorical emblems and the baroque infinitesimal method of calculus (Origin 92), these images attempt to incorporate the ambivalence of movement and time into the static, spatial frame of a single instant. As with the boundaries between each saint and each act, the boundaries between one temporal moment and another seem to blur together in this allegorical treatment, like a sequence of slowly metamorphosing photographs in a flip book or like frames in a reel of film, each image distinctly separate from – while also seeming to merge into – the next.12 Self-dividing, and riven by an internal tension between frozenness and fluidity, Stein’s text thus formally translates into poetic terms the experience of the tableau vivant that Benjamin describes as a hallmark of allegory in baroque theatrical performance (Origin 193). Stein’s “presence” as the text’s author also makes itself felt in Four Saints’s libretto, and she too is subject to this same manner of allegorical treatment and this same form of self-division. Rather than taking the form of an internal monologue, large parts of the text unfold as a conversation for numerous debating voices, taking place in “counterpoint” with one another, as the process of writing the text is inscribed into the written text itself (Dydo 405). This is particularly true of the opera’s prologue, which suggests the author focusing a hermetic consciousness upon the task at hand, to “prepare for saints” (440); that is, to prepare to write the opera itself. The opera has already begun, and its beginning ruminates on how to begin. Its beginning is already behind – and ahead of – itself. Ulla Dydo has effectively described this preparative prologue as a meditative act, an author’s struggle to grasp an image that could effectively ground an opening scene. Just as the opera includes a Saint Plan and a Saint Settlement, Four Saints radically involves the author’s process of planning the text and settling upon textual decisions. “Imagine four benches separately,” the libretto demands, “One in Modern Drama 58:3 (2015) 359 http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.0747 - Joseph Cermatori <joseph.cermatori@gmail.com> - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 8:31:02 AM - IP Address:69.22.245.46 JOSEPH CERMATORI the sun. / Two in the sun. / Three in the sun. / One not in the sun. / Not one not in the sun. / Not one. / Four benches used four benches used separately. / Four benches used separately” (441). In imagination and in conversation with herself, the author is attempting “[t]o mount it up” – that is, she is labouring toward a mental staging of sorts. Should benches appear? And if so, how and how many? There seems not to be a consensus. When the question of how many benches returns two lines later, it is only to be forcibly set aside in an abrupt self-interruption: “Four benches with leave it” (441). The matter has been settled, however provisionally. The poetic vision approaches like a wonder – another passage indicates, “It is very close close and closed” – and Stein, self-divided, instructs herself in her next plan: “Begin suddenly not with sisters” (441). “Imagine imagine it imagine it in it” (443), the text’s voices command themselves and, thereby, the audience. Much of Four Saints unfolds in this way, not a single poetic speaker but a multitude in polyphonic responsiveness with itself. Four Saints’s libretto is always at work exposing the work of writing itself and making this work into play. It could, on the one hand, be considered a form of what Della Pollack has described as “performative writing,” but it might more accurately be said to expose and theatrically stage the performative processuality of written texts itself.13 Like the two Saint Teresas of Thomson’s musical setting, Stein’s plural poetic voice is always in conversation with itself. For Stein, as for the two Saint Teresas, identity is always already “dividual,” differential, non-unitary. In the betweennesses of the continual present, the author of Four Saints is always in a semi-fixed, semi-fluid state of continual becoming (like “St. Teresa about to be” [446], or “Saint Teresa having not commenced” [447]), appearing like an emblematic image divided imminently. For Stein, identity cannot be made synonymous with indivisibility or individuality; rather, it is a function of imminent difference and repetition. But it is the markedly imagistic character of Four Saints’s text that suggests its most productive affinities with baroque theatrical allegory. In order to make any sense of the work at all, one must approach Stein’s libretto the way Benjamin’s baroque allegorist approaches his emblematic puzzle pieces, as a kind of bricoleur who “rummages here and there for a particular piece, holds it next to some other piece, and tests to see if they fit together – that meaning with this image or this image with that meaning. The result can never be known beforehand, for there is no natural mediation between the two” (Arcades J80,2; J80a,1). Much the same can be said for a text such as Four Saints, whose fragmentary images and meanings frequently suggest no necessary connection between and among themselves, imposing the creative work of allegorical interpretation on the reader or spectator or stage director. “What is the difference between a picture and pictured,” the text asks 360 Modern Drama 58:3 (2015) http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.0747 - Joseph Cermatori <joseph.cermatori@gmail.com> - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 8:31:02 AM - IP Address:69.22.245.46 Baroque Gesture in Four Saints in Three Acts quizzically, then spills into a cascade of paratactic imagery: “One a window. / Two a shutter. / Three a palace. / Four a widow. / Five an adopted son. / Six a parlor. / Seven a shawl. / Eight an arbor. / Nine a seat. / Ten a retirement” (452). The meanings of this constellation are left open to enigmatic reflection. The same can be said for the nails that appear abundantly in the text’s central section (“How many nails are there in it. / Hard shoe nails and silver nails and silver does not sound valuable” [455]). These might be the nails of Christ’s crucifixion, imagined as in one of St. Ignatius’s meditative exercises; or else the building implements of a heavenly mansion, as Grosser’s scenario indicates. But Stein’s text authorizes neither of these readings singly or fully. Elsewhere, these thingly images wax surreal, as when “[t]he envelopes are on all the fruit of the fruit trees” (479). Regardless of how these images are to be materialized onstage, the question of vision remains crucial within Four Saints’s libretto, for Stein comes into closest proximity with her saintly and baroque protagonists through the opera’s frequent returns to visionary experience.14 Grosser’s scenario builds on this imagistic quality, creating not only a series of so-called “Tableaux” but also a number of scenic moments clearly offered as sacred visions. These include a moment in which one of the Saint Teresas was to appear “in ecstasy, seated, with angel hovering” (an obvious homage to Bernini’s sculpture whose photograph graced the premiere’s program) and another moment in which “St. Ignatius predicts the Last Judgement” (a reference to the tradition of representing apocalyptic visions in baroque painting).15 Elsewhere, a more modern apocalyptic vision is dismissed almost casually. In a striking and eerie exchange, Thomson has two saints in idle chit-chat. The first: “If it were possible to kill five thousand chinamen by pressing a button would it be done.” The second: “Saint Teresa not interested” (445). Here – as in Herbert Jhering’s understanding of historical life as it was experienced at the time of the German baroque – an apocalyptic event is encountered as an everyday inconvenience, a subject for polite conversation that either elicits one’s interest or doesn’t. This is, in a sense, Stein’s most strikingly gestic moment. For all Stein’s playfulness, her world remains haunted by catastrophe. But if catastrophe is ultimately ineradicable from Stein’s sun-drenched landscape, Four Saints nevertheless evinces a shift of emphasis that must be observed – away from Trauer and mournfulness and towards spiel and play. This shift is evident in what is undoubtedly the most famous of the opera’s several visionary moments, a passage Thomson set as an aria for Ignatius – “Pigeons on the grass alas” – which the composer and scenarist conceived, under Stein’s advisement, as a vision of the Holy Ghost (Watson 47–48): Pigeons on the grass alas. Pigeons on the grass alas. Modern Drama 58:3 (2015) 361 http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.0747 - Joseph Cermatori <joseph.cermatori@gmail.com> - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 8:31:02 AM - IP Address:69.22.245.46 JOSEPH CERMATORI Short longer grass short longer longer shorter yellow grass Pigeons large pigeons on the shorter longer yellow grass alas pigeons on the grass. If they were not pigeons what were they. (467–68) Stein explained, in an interview, that this moment had its genesis during one of her walks in the baroque gardens of the seventeenth-century Luxembourg Palace in Paris: “It was the end of summer the grass was yellow. I was sorry that it was the end of summer and I saw the big fat pigeons in the yellow grass and I said to myself, pigeons on the yellow grass, alas, and I kept on writing pigeons on the grass, alas . . . until I had emptied myself of the emotion” (qtd. in Bowers 138). Stein initially finds herself within a psychologically mournful situation, observing the seasonal passage of time and the ruin this wreaks upon even the most seemingly banal elements of the natural landscape – the lawn – and expressing this mournful attitude, almost gesturally, in the word “alas.” But Stein ultimately refuses mournful affects. She rids herself of them through an experience of semantic satiation: that defamiliarizing moment when repeating a word or a phrase divorces it from its meaning until it has become a nonsensical sound, laying bare language’s arbitrariness, conventionality, and sensuous materiality. Here, in ways similar to Stein’s “Rose is a rose is a rose,” insistent repetition seeks playfully to redeem the word from its melancholic non-identity with its referent. “Pigeons on the grass alas pigeons on the grass alas pigeons on the grass alas . . .” Mourning miraculously becomes the pleasure of rhyme, round sound answering round sound. It is significant that this redemptive moment – in which mourning is cancelled and perhaps even sublimated into elation – should occur at the moment of Stein’s vision of the Holy Ghost. For if the pigeons on the grass suggest themselves, however improbably, as an allegory of baroque mournfulness, they are juxtaposed with a “magpie in the sky on the sky.” (“If a magpie in the sky on the sky can not cry if the pigeon on the grass alas can alas and to pass the pigeon on the grass alas and the magpie in the sky on the sky and to try and to try alas on the grass alas the pigeon on the grass the pigeon on the grass and alas” [468].) Of this moment, Stein offered the following explanation: Magpies are in the landscape that is they are in the sky of a landscape, they are black and white . . . When they are in the sky they do something that I have never seen any other bird do they hold themselves up and down and look flat against the sky . . . [T]he magpies at Avila do do it or do not at least they look as if they do do it. They look exactly like the birds in the Annunciation pictures the bird which is the Holy Ghost and rests flat against the side sky very high. (qtd. in Bowers 140) For Stein, all of nature puts itself forward as a baroque text to be read allegorically.16 The magpie in/on the sky asserts itself as one example of this kind of 362 Modern Drama 58:3 (2015) http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.0747 - Joseph Cermatori <joseph.cermatori@gmail.com> - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 8:31:02 AM - IP Address:69.22.245.46 Baroque Gesture in Four Saints in Three Acts reading – its flatness like that of an image on a canvas or page – translating imaginatively among physical referents, graphic images, textual hieroglyphs, and immanent and transcendent signifiers and signifieds. But although the image of the dove suspended flatly against the backdrop of the sky is a familiar icon within Christian religious imagery – a vision of the Holy Spirit – what is pictured in such a vision is not a sign but the Holy Spirit itself. The flattened bird, whether dove or magpie, is less an allegorical emblem than something more akin to what Benjamin describes (in contrast to allegory) as a theological symbol, a prelapsarian logos, in which word and thing attains a sacred, reparative unity. Stein is unsure whether the magpies in physical reality are actually capable of pausing mid-flight, to rest flat in a moment of standstill, but it is enough that they look as if they do do it. In this moment, physical reality has become art, just as, in Stein’s dramaturgy, ecological land becomes artistic landscape. At precisely the moment when Stein’s discourse in Four Saints is about to succumb to an attitude of mournfulness before the transitory nature of the physical world, the Holy Spirit appears, like a deus ex machina – one might say it flashes up before her – transforming mournfulness into playfulness and repairing, however momentarily, the broken relationship between language and the nature it purports to represent. LAST ACT / WHICH IS A FACT? In the opera’s final moments, its saints line up laterally to exclaim, “Last act. / Which is a fact” (480). The blunt, emphatically declarative statement of the last act’s factual status is enough, on its own, to call into question just how final the moment can actually be. How and when can an opera end – once and for all – when it is so thoroughly preoccupied with beginning again and again? Sure enough, Four Saints has gone on to have a storied afterlife, attracting the admiration of John Cage, Robert Wilson, Mark Morris, and many others.17 If Four Saints allows us to think of Stein as participating in the tradition of the baroque, the question of this tradition’s transmission to her inheritors and admirers arises somewhat insistently. I conclude the present article with a brief detour to one such admirer, Stein’s friend Thornton Wilder, whom she met some months after Four Saints’s premiere. In an unpublished, holograph manuscript, in one of his notebooks composed during this time, Wilder would record the opinion that the tradition of baroque theatre persisted into his own lifetime, in the work of Wagner and Max Reinhardt. The title of Wilder’s essay, “On the Barock,” declares its central argument openly: that the baroque consists in the capacity for recognizing the miraculous in everyday life. Although Four Saints in Three Acts goes unmentioned, Stein could easily be adduced as an example of a baroque theatre artist who glimpses the ordinary as always already extraordinary. Four Saints Modern Drama 58:3 (2015) 363 http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.0747 - Joseph Cermatori <joseph.cermatori@gmail.com> - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 8:31:02 AM - IP Address:69.22.245.46 JOSEPH CERMATORI is nearest to Wilder’s conception of baroque in the way that its spiritual-compositional exercises allow the extraordinary attributes of a landscape or any seemingly unexceptional vision to come forward. Like any good miracle play, or like one extended baroque apotheosis, Four Saints suspends the norms of representation and dramaturgical realism (Blackmer 325–26). But as a work of baroque modernism, it effects this suspension for the purposes of exposing the way the exceptional resides within the space of the normative. Like Brecht, whom Benjamin understood as an inheritor of the baroque tradition (“What Is Epic” 17–18), Stein is able to present her audience with the ordinary conditions of life in a way that allows them to be recognized, not with complacency, as in naturalism, but with astonishment. Where Benjamin perceived that Brechtian astonishment stems from the Epic Theatre’s capacity for “making gestures quotable,” Stein’s Four Saints functions by a similar principle of gestural citability (19). The historical significance of both Stein’s and Brecht’s various approaches to formalism can be found at the juncture of baroque wonder and modernist defamiliarization. As with Brecht, this aspect of Stein’s work involves a crucially political potential.18 In his enthusiasms for Stein and the baroque, Wilder was just the latest in a line of gay men to attach themselves to her work – a list that also includes Virgil Thomson, Maurice Grosser, Chick Austin, and most of their Harvard classmates who collaborated to bring Four Saints’s Hartford premiere off, as well as Frederick Ashton (Watson 79–114) – and this fact suggests that their shared gay and lesbian identification plays some role in the affection for baroque style they had in common. By the 1950s, an explicit relationship between the baroque and camp would become evident in the writings of Christopher Isherwood (110); and by the 1970s, its connection to same-sex desire would become manifest in the writings of Severo Sarduy and in Susan Sontag’s ability to speak blithely about a category of “homosexual baroque” (Sontag). As Four Saints was the brainchild of a host of gay collaborators, it was well ahead of its time in anticipating this relationship, but only if we recognize its participation within a larger modernist baroque tradition. The (largely still) nonnormative situation of not-being-heterosexual entails the possibility of an outsider position, a critical potential that – as with baroque ways of seeing – begins with the defamiliarized capacity for regarding the ordinary from a distance and perceiving the trace of the extraordinary within it. (As with baroque allegory, this would be a defamiliarization that takes place at the level of a queer nonidentity between materiality and meaning: my body and the set of meanings culturally assigned to it have no necessary relationship.) The same is undoubtedly true for work that takes place at the conjunction of “black and baroque” (Harris 130), as the premiere of Four Saints in Three Acts undoubtedly did, with its black cast in drag as a cabal of European mystics. From this vantage, 364 Modern Drama 58:3 (2015) http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.0747 - Joseph Cermatori <joseph.cermatori@gmail.com> - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 8:31:02 AM - IP Address:69.22.245.46 Baroque Gesture in Four Saints in Three Acts baroque theatricality functions, not as the propagandistic style of the absolutist state or counter-reformation Church, but as a queer form of deconstruction that exposes the highly extraordinary and unusual processes by which the ordinary itself comes to be established as such. It serves not to sediment ideology but to theatrically expose ideology and call it into question. This deconstructive concept of the baroque is already at work in Benjamin’s writings on allegory; with Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts, its conceptual history moves into a new direction, arguably both gayer and queerer. Both figures call into question the modern myth of history’s progressive character, invoking the similarities between baroque and modernism as emblems of a situation in which historical movement has come to appear cyclical or static. With Stein’s Four Saints, and with its premiere production especially, this view of history appears literally onstage, in theatrical performance. With each insistence and each posed gesture, Four Saints exposes and questions an ideology of historical progressivism, demanding that we notice instead history’s reiterations, citations, and repetitions. NOTES 1 While modernism’s relation to the baroque has become a subject of interest in recent theatre studies (see Witt), Stein’s place in this larger field of inquiry has been entirely overlooked. Harris’s study of Four Saints is alone in noting the work’s numerous baroque citations but does not offer a systematic analysis of them. 2 On performance repertoires as mediums of historical transmission, see Taylor. 3 A discussion of Benjamin’s theory of baroque Trauerspiel – including the form’s dependence on allegory and its distinctness from ancient tragedy – lies outside this article’s scope. Steiner’s introduction to Osborne’s translation of the Trauerspiel study offers a brief and schematic overview (16–17). 4 Stein’s 1927 text uses the spelling “Therese” – the French version that was also her nickname for Alice Toklas – where Thomson’s score substituted, with Stein’s approval, the Spanish spelling Teresa for its added euphony (Thomson and Stein xxx). Although all my citations are to Stein’s libretto, I have retained Thomson’s Spanish spelling throughout for consistency’s sake. 5 The phrase “baroque fantasia” later appeared prominently in the production’s Broadway press releases, where it was taken up by Stark Young 356–57, in his review of the production for Theater Arts Monthly. 6 “Plays” makes clear that Stein’s dramaturgy of syncopation has a formal analogue in and was inspired by jazz syncopation (xxx). On repetition and revision as a principle of temporality in dramaturgy and jazz, see Parks 9–10. Modern Drama 58:3 (2015) 365 http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.0747 - Joseph Cermatori <joseph.cermatori@gmail.com> - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 8:31:02 AM - IP Address:69.22.245.46 JOSEPH CERMATORI 7 See also, the well-known figure of the rose in T.S. Eliot’s discussion of the dissociation of sensibility that, according to his 1921 essay on “The Metaphysical Poets,” occurred at the time of the historical baroque. 8 For a discussion of the present participle as theatricality’s grammatical and deconstructive hallmark, see Weber 14–15. 9 I here paraphrase John Osborne, who renders Benjamin’s “Die Geschichte wandert in den Schauplatz hinein” as “History merges into the setting”; compare Benjamin, Ursprung 73 with Benjamin, Origin 92. 10 Here La Farge’s account of his hermeneutic illiteracy strikingly recalls Stein’s memory of her youthful experience of watching Sarah Bernhardt playing Phèdre in French; see “Plays” xlii. 11 On radical lesbian feminism and gaiety, see Warner 1–30, esp. 12 on Stein. 12 On cinematic montage in Stein, see Robinson 19. 13 The question of the textual performativity of Stein’s plays is also taken up in Worthen 57–73. On the incorporation of the process of writing into the text itself, see also Blackmer 332; Puchner 113; Bowers 25. 14 See Dydo 196. For a detailed overview of Stein’s relation to saints and visions (esp. vis-à-vis her relationship to William James), see Dydo 180–1. 15 These indications are given in Thomson’s score. The vision of Teresa in ecstasy was meant to coordinate with Stein’s passage beginning “[t]here can be no peace on earth with calm with calm” (451); the vision of the Last Judgment, with the passage beginning “[a]round is a sound around is a sound” (475). 16 Marranca makes the claim that Stein reads nature as a text: “In the Steinian ecology, language exists everywhere in the landscape, as if all space were semantic, the world a book” (76). 17 For an even fuller catalogue of artists who have claimed Stein as an influence, see Bay-Cheng 114–40. 18 Elin Diamond has already productively related Stein, by way of a Derridean framework, to Brecht as a prototype for a “gestic feminist criticism” capable of contesting patriarchal hegemony (82–94). WORKS CITED Bay-Cheng, Sarah. Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein’s Avant-Garde Theater. New York: Routledge, 2004. Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. 1998. London: Verso, 2003. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002. Benjamin, Walter. Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels [Origin of German Tragic Drama]. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978. 366 Modern Drama 58:3 (2015) http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.0747 - Joseph Cermatori <joseph.cermatori@gmail.com> - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 8:31:02 AM - IP Address:69.22.245.46 Baroque Gesture in Four Saints in Three Acts Benjamin, Walter. “What is Epic Theatre? [Second Version].” 1939. Understanding Brecht. Trans. Anna Bostock. London: Verso, 2003. 15–22. Blackmer, Corinne. “The Ecstasies of Saint Teresa: The Saint as Queer Diva from Crashaw to Four Saints in Three Acts.” En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera. Ed. Corinne E. Blackmer and Patricia Juliana Smith. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. 306–47. Bowers, Jane Palatini. They Watch Me As They Watch This: Gertrude Stein’s Metadrama. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1991. Diamond, Elin. “Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory: Toward a Gestic Feminist Criticism.” TDR 32.1 (1988): 82–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/ 1145871. Dydo, Ulla. Gertrude Stein: The Language that Rises, 1923–1934. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2003. Eliot, T.S. “A Note on Richard Crashaw.” For Lancelot Andrewes: Four Essays on Style and Order. London: Faber, 1928. 117–25. Eliot, T.S. “The Metaphysical Poets.” 1921. “The Sacred Wood” and Major Early Essays. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1998. 125–29. Gaddis, Eugene. Magician of the Modern: Chick Austin and the Transformation of the Arts in America. New York: Random, 2011. Harris, David. “The Original Four Saints in Three Acts.” TDR 26.1 (1982): 101–30. Isherwood, Christopher. The World in the Evening. New York: Random, 1954. Jhering, Herbert. “Der Dramatiker Bert Brecht [The Dramatist Bert Brecht]” The Weimar Republic Sourcebook. Ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. 534–35. Parks, Suzan-Lori. The America Play and Other Works. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995. Marranca, Bonnie. Performance Histories. New York: PAJ, 2008. Pollack, Della. “Performing Writing.” The Ends of Performance. Ed. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane. New York: NYU P, 1998. 73–103. Puchner, Martin. Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins UP, 2002. Robinson, Marc. The Other American Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. New York: Routledge, 2011. Sontag, Susan. “Syberberg’s Hitler.” New York Review of Books. 21 Feb. 1980. 19 May 2015 <http://www.syberberg.de/Syberberg4_2010/Susan-SontagSyberbergs-Hitler-engl.html>. Stein, Gertrude. “Composition as Explanation.” Writings 1903–1932. New York: Library of America, 1998. 520–29. Modern Drama 58:3 (2015) 367 http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.0747 - Joseph Cermatori <joseph.cermatori@gmail.com> - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 8:31:02 AM - IP Address:69.22.245.46 JOSEPH CERMATORI Stein, Gertrude. Four Saints in Three Acts. 1927. Stein, Last Operas 440–80. Stein, Gertrude. Last Operas and Plays. Ed. Carl Van Vechten. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. Stein, Gertrude. “Plays.” 1935. Stein, Last Operas xxix–lii. Stein, Gertrude. “Portraits and Repetition.” 1935. Lectures in America. New York: Random, 1975. 163–204. Stein, Gertrude. “Sacred Emily.” 1913. Geography and Plays. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1993. 178–88. Stein, Gertrude, and Virgil Thomson. The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson: Composition as Conversation. Ed. Susan Holbrook and Thomas Dilworth. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Steiner, George. Introduction. Benjamin, Origin 17–24. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/ 9780822385318. Thomson, Virgil. “To Gertrude Stein.” 1933. Stein and Thomson 208. Thomson, Virgil, and Gertrude Stein. Four Saints in Three Acts. Musical score. Ed. H. Wiley Hitchcock and Charles Fussell. Middleton, WI: Amer. Musicological Soc., 2008. Van Vechten, Carl. “How I Listen to Four Saints in Three Acts.” Souvenir program note, Four Saints in Three Acts, 44th Street Theatre [Broadway Premiere]. New York: 1934. Warner, Sara. Acts of Gaiety: LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2012. Watson, Steven. Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998. Weber, Samuel. Theatricality as Medium. New York: Fordham UP, 2004. http://dx.doi.org/10.5422/fso/9780823224159.001.0001. Wilder, Thornton. Introduction. Four in America. By Gertrude Stein. New Haven: Yale UP, 1947. v–xxvii. Wilder, Thornton. “On the Barock, or How to Recognize a Miracle in the Daily Life.” n.d. MS, Thornton Wilder Papers, Series II, Writings. Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT. Witt, Mary Ann Frese. Metatheater and Modernity: Baroque and Neobaroque. Lanham, MD: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2013. Worthen, W.B. Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Young, Stark. “Reading Lesson.” Theater Arts Monthly 28.5 (1934): 354–57. 368 Modern Drama 58:3 (2015) http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.0747 - Joseph Cermatori <joseph.cermatori@gmail.com> - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 8:31:02 AM - IP Address:69.22.245.46 Baroque Gesture in Four Saints in Three Acts ABOUT THE AUTHOR joseph cermatori is a Ph.D. candidate studying theatre in the Columbia University Department of English and Comparative Literature. He is also associate editor of PAJ and a lecturer in theatre and interdisciplinary arts at The New School. Modern Drama 58:3 (2015) 369