[This is the second and last installment of “Pat Carroll Pat Carroll Pat Carroll: A Tribute.” (If you haven’t read Part 1, I recommend going back to 14 August and doing so; you’ll find this segment of the post makes more sense if you do.)
[I’ll be presenting a “recovered” report on Carroll and Marty Martin’s one-woman play, Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein, introduced in Part 1, followed by a survey of the published reviews of the New York Off-Broadway productions.
[The
recovered reports, which I’ve attempted a couple of
times on Rick
On Theater (“Some Out-Of-Town Plays from the Archive: Othello,” 22
December 2020; “Much Ado About Nothing: A ‘Recovered’ Report.” 20 March
2021), are analogous to the contemporaneous play reports I post on ROT,
except that I never wrote up the plays after I saw them.
[These reports are based on some comments I’d made in other contexts and a random collection of very vivid impressions of the performances I saw. I also use a little research to help remind me of details of the production.
[I called the result a “recovered” report on the analogy of “recovered memory”—which is defined as “a memory of a past event that has been recalled after having been forgotten . . . for a long time,” according to Dictionary.com.]
The Circle Repertory Company presented Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein at its Greenwich Village theater for six performances on Wednesday through Sunday, 6-10 June 1979 while the company was waiting for Sam Shepard’s Pultzer Prize-winning Buried Child to move from the Theatre de Lys (now the Lucille Lortel Theatre), but Pat Carroll’s performance and Marty Martin’s script proved so popular that Circle Rep decided to keep it running.
Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein and Buried Child opened in alternate-night rep on 24 June at the company’s Sheridan Square Playhouse, a former garage-turned-nightclub, and ran until September. After a single benefit performance at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where Carroll viewed the celebrated Cone Collection—the Baltimorean Cone Sisters were friends of Stein, who advised them on their collecting—on 29 September 1979, GS3 returned to the Sheridan Square Playhouse until October.
The play then moved on the 23rd to the historic Provincetown Playhouse on Macdougal Street, where it ran for nine more months (and where I saw it in June 1980), closing on 3 August 1980—over a year’s run all together. There was buzz about a possible Broadway transfer, but that never materialized.
After its successful New York run, the one-character play toured the U.S. into 1981 and beyond, including the Arena Stage in Washington; Cleveland Playhouse in Ohio; McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey; Zellerbach Theatre at the Annenberg Center, Penn State, in Philadelphia; Alliance Theatre in Atlanta; and other U.S. cities, many for a single night. There were invitations to bring the play to festivals in Alaska, Canada, Europe, Australia, Israel, and South Africa.
There was talk of filming GS3 for either the big or small screen, and an adaptation was broadcast on CBS Cable (a short-lived pay cable service) on 6 and 7 March 1982. (There was also the Grammy-winning 1980 Caedmon recording.) Carroll reprised the role in productions across the country and around the world many times for the remainder of her career.
Carroll’s portrayal of Stein was a striking change from her habitual comic turns. We theatergoers saw a compelling dramatic presentation—though with plenty of humor and (often snappish) wit. I don’t write fan letters, but after seeing Carroll’s performance in GS3, I sat down and wrote one to her. I told her that if she ever took on students, I was ready to sign up! (She didn’t take me up on my offer.)
I trained as an actor and worked a decade in the profession, and retain a love for the practitioners of Thespis’ art. I even used to keep a list in my head of a dozen or so individual performances that had astonished me. Pat Carroll in Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein was prominent on that list.
I’ve sat through a good number of realistic and naturalistic performances that fooled me into forgetting I was watching a play. One of the most notable in my memory is Carroll’s Gertrude Stein. Her performance was so magical that I found myself literally thinking, as I was watching her, ‘Gee, Stein’s a fascinating person. I’m so glad I met her.’
When I realized what I was thinking—that that was actually Gertrude Stein in front of me—I was mighty glad I didn’t say that out loud so my companion and others near me could hear how deeply I’d fallen under Carroll’s spell.
The play is set in the Paris apartment in which Stein and Alice B. Toklas live at 27 Rue de Fleurus. (The street, pronounced flur-ooss, is named for a town in Belgium that was the site of a 1794 battle during the French Revolutionary Wars.) Stein has lived here since 1903, first with her older brother Leo and then with Toklas from 1910. (Leo and Gertrude separated in 1913; the break is the climax of the play’s narrative.)
Designer Anne Gibson’s set at the Provincetown—there was a different scenic designer at Circle Rep, Tony Straiges—was a representation of the cluttered apartment with the Picassos, Gauguins, Matisses, and other art works with which the Steins had decorated their walls. There were a few pieces of furniture from the period. The stark lighting was by Ruth Roberts.
When the lights come up—there’s no curtain—68-year-old Stein (Carroll, who was 53 when I saw the play) is seated in a chair, at the center of the room, dressed in a brown caftan (the sole costume was designed by Garland Riddle), with closely-cropped grey hair. Not as closely-cropped as Stein’s was at this time in her life, which was a mannish brush-cut, but not as matronly as her hair was styled, in a graying bun, in the ’20s. She’s drinking a glass of tea and lights a cigarillo.
In the play, Stein sits in the throne-like chair with her legs spread, but my vision of her that I still carry with me when I think of this performance is the Jo Davidson terra-cotta sculpture (Gertrude Stein 1874-1946, 1922-23) in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.
While Stein seems to be kneeling, a Man Ray photo of her posing for Davidson reveals that she was, in fact, sitting in a chair just as Carroll was in the play. Davidson merely sculpted her from the knees up, making Stein appear Buddha-like—which the artist thought was appropriate for his subject.
(From 1992, there’s been a bronze casting of Davidson’s sculpture in Bryant Park, behind the main research branch of the New York Public Library on 5th Avenue between 40th and 42nd Streets. Whenever I see that rendering, it makes me flash back to the performance of Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein I saw in 1980.)
Over the shoulder of the famous expat, among the other paintings, is the well-known Picasso portrait of her. It’s 1938, the day before she and Toklas will be evicted from their home of 35 years because the landlord’s son needs a place to live. It’s raining and there are thunderclaps.
Stein and Toklas have been packing and Stein’s flatmate is sleeping upstairs. The imminent eviction makes Stein reminisce about the life that unfolded at 27 Rue de Fleurus over the past 3½ decades. The apartment is so full of her life and the ghosts of her illustrious visitors that it prompts an outpouring of memories that’s echoed by the downpouring rain outside.
“It is it almost always is it was and it is almost always an inconvenience to be evicted.”
After that, Stein/Carroll becomes a superb raconteur and confides in us many of the stories of her life in Paris in the first four decades of the 20th century. She also reaches back into her childhood in California and her studies at Radcliffe and Johns Hopkins. For 90 minutes, we become Stein’s confidants. We hear Stein’s views on art, life, writing, and the import of genius and fame.
She recounts the disastrous Rousseau dinner the Picassos organized at their Montmartre home in honor of painter Henri Rousseau, known as Le Douanier (‘The Customs Agent’), at which everyone got very drunk—because there was nothing to eat but spinach—and behaved badly; the discovery of a painting by the as-yet unknown Paul Cézanne in a gallery by Gertrude and Leo; the time a drunken Hemingway paid Stein and Toklas a call and they refused to admit him, resulting in a rift between the young writer and older mentor and champion; and, finally, Leo’s loss of faith in Cubism and modernism and his embrace of a reactionary sensibility, causing him to call his sister’s avant-garde writing “tommyrot.”
At the end of the play, Stein looks around at the art works on the walls of the apartment. She declares with quiet pride: “We moved out one century from these rooms and moved in another.”
There’s no plot in Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein, no narrative though-line, no cause-and-effect chain. Martin’s text is a stream-of-consciousness tumble of memory, sometimes connected by a lot of “That reminds me”’s and “That brings me to”’s.
Needless to say, after all my undisguised praise, it was all wonderfully spun and fascinating to hear. We’d been offered the invitation to be part of the literary world’s most renowned salonière’s Saturday evening soirée, and it was a delicious experience.
It was a momentary puzzle why we’d be included among the intelligentsia who invented modern Western culture, not to mention how we’d all fit in Stein’s apartment—but that passed, unanswered, as we became engrossed in Carroll’s impressionistic portrayal of the disenfranchised intellectual.
There’s only a single actor listed in the program—GS3 is labeled a “one-person play,” but it’s really not. Martin used the words and recollections of a score or more of the literary and artistic giants of the Western world in the early 20th century to make a portrait of Gertrude Stein, but Carroll contrived to bring them onto the stage for us to see and hear.
Stein was a name-dropper extraordinaire, but Carroll did far more than drop illustrious names. She made us see and hear the famous friends Stein and Toklas assembled at 27 Rue de Fleurus, creating and casting virtual playlets (long before that word had any meaning) that were as engaging as the one she was in. I absolutely believed that Alice Toklas was just upstairs asleep. It’s a conjuring trick no magician could accomplish. Only an actor could do it.
Carroll accomplished this feat by recalling the personal traits of these people we tend to know only as icons. Her Stein knew all their foibles and quirks, and sketched them in. The distant legends of art and culture thus became warm human beings who did foolish—and sometimes hurtful—things.
Perhaps the most delicate memory Carroll’s Stein discusses is the matter of her lesbianism. Carroll said she didn’t want GS3 to be a gay play, but she didn’t want it to be dishonest, either. So when Stein reminisces about her first homosexual experience, with a woman at Johns Hopkins, it’s discussed paraphrastically, by inference. Nothing is said directly.
But it leads Stein into talking about being fat, and that leads into talking about how she always felt different, which is ultimately what impelled her to leave America—because she never fit in. It was also what made Alice Toklas follow the Steins, and what brought the two women together for the rest of Stein’s life. (From 1907, when they met, to 1946, when Stein died, Stein and Toklas were never separated.)
The relationship with Toklas, however, isn’t emphasized. It’s implied, of course, and hovers around the play whenever Stein brings her roommate up, but it’s not the emotional or dramatic center of the play. As I’ve noted, the break-up with Leo was more impactful to the performance than Alice B. Toklas.
That’s not in the least inappropriate. After all, Leo had been his sister’s mentor for over 40 years. But though he was the one who left their shared abode—Leo had actually instigated the salon, though Stein became the hostess—intellectually, she was the one who left him.
She championed the new art and the new writing, going in her own direction, and he couldn’t handle that she stopped listening to him. They never spoke to one another again. That’s much more wrenching than a 30-year devotion between Stein and Toklas, isn’t it?
Carroll insisted that the performance was not a monologue, as most of the press coverage dubbed it. It’s a “duologue,” declared the actress. The other half of the conversation is provided by the audience. (Occasionally, Carroll recounted, a theatergoer actually voiced a response to Stein.) She added that the play is different at every performance, but not because she makes any changes. Each audience responds differently.
Carroll sat in the chair for most of the play. Only occasionally getting up, when Stein is especially agitated, for brief moments to walk about the apartment. But her hands were so animated and eloquent that the play didn’t seem static. Her face, too, was infinitely expressive. Of course, GS3 is a verbal play, depending on Martin’s words to take the place of action.
Ordinarily, that would be a detriment; word plays are almost always talky. In one-actor plays like Hal Holbrook’s Mark Twain Tonight! (Broadway, 1966; television, 1967) and Clarence Darrow with Henry Fonda (Broadway, 1975; television, 1974), the actors walked about the set a good deal, but, as GS3 was conceived for an incapacitated Carroll, Stein is mostly seated. Yet Carroll exuded energy so vibrantly that her Stein is always vital even when stationary.
Still, the words are the true action of Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein, and Carroll made them dance—the way one imagines Gertrude Stein would have when she captivated those students in 1934.
I guess it’s obvious without my even saying so that I thought Pat Carroll’s performance was extraordinary. (I wasn’t the only one; her reviews were excellent.) Even as restricted as she was, Carroll held the stage for the whole hour-and-a-half and never lost her grip on us. She even made Stein’s idiosyncratic speech—those triple repetitions—seem like natural talk from a sophisticated, hyper-intellectual woman.
In several interviews, Carroll asserted that for this role, she didn’t just rely on the rehearsals and her homework to develop the performance. She drew on everything she had learned over the thirty-some-odd years of her career.
She pulled out all the stops, and whether she whispered or roared, she made the language alive. No wonder the recording of the play won a Grammy. (By the way, I even bought the album when it came out. I wanted documentation of that performance.)
The smallest gesture—the shrug of a shoulder, the twitch of a finger, the slap of a table, or the clench of a fist—filled the theater. Even her distinctive laugh that made her so popular on TV game shows was part of her offering; boisterous and infectious, it became Stein’s laugh.
Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein was one of the longest-running one-person shows of the ’70s. The press found the evening “enormously fascinating” and “poignant” (from the New Brunswick Home News and Variety) and actress Carroll received the best reviews of her career, capturing both the humor and the sorrow of the character. Let’s look at what some of the reviewers said about Marty Martin’s play and Carroll’s portrayal of the iconoclastic American expatriate in Paris.
Because the coverage was so extensive, with many regional papers reviewing the New York City run and then local papers all over the country writing about the national-tour performances, I’m going to limit my review round-up to the Off-Broadway productions alone. (There were notices into 1985, and even reviews of Carroll’s performance in Jerusalem in the Jerusalem Post.)
In the New York Times in June 1979, after the play’s fill-in stint at Circle Rep was extended but before it moved to the Provincetown, Richard Eder characterized Martin’s script as “appealing,” but felt, “It lacks the intuitive brilliance of James Lapine’s effort to literally stage a poem of Miss Stein’s in “Photograph,” two years ago.”
Mr. Martin's assemblage is anecdotal, and intelligent rather than inspired; but it works very well on the whole, and it gives scope for Miss Carroll’s winning and often very moving performance.
(The 1920 poem “Photograph” is composed in five sections Stein labeled “acts.” This gave Lapine [books for Into the Woods, Falsettos, and Passion] a rationale to stage it in 1977 for the Performance Workshop at SoHo’s Open Space. “It is a lovely and remarkably successful attempt to render the qualities of Gertrude Stein in theatrical terms,” wrote the New York Times.)
The Timesman found that the playwright “has realized that Miss Stein’s wit, her reflections about herself and others, and the wealth of anecdote need to be anchored to something; and he has accomplished this very well.”
Carroll, reported Eder, “glares and beams as she talks, caught up in the fascination of telling and recalling. . . . [She] revels in the beat and counterpoint of her phrases; but she disciplines them as well, cutting them off abruptly in the sheer enjoyment of showing who is boss.”
“It is, all in all,” concluded Eder, “a moving and splendidly personified picture that Miss Carroll gives us; a piece of cultural history that like all good history strikes us as the history of ourselves.”
Four months later, after Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein’s open-ended run had started, the Times’ Walter Kerr saw the play. “Off to the Provincetown I went,” Kerr related, “and I went expecting a great deal. I got more than I bargained for.”
He expected “outrageousness,” he confessed, and “Miss Carroll . . . obliges in spades.” The Times reviewer noted that in her portrayal of Stein, “some of the time,” Carroll is
content to snuggle, warmed with self-satisfaction, in the chair built as four square as she is, as often as not she’s likely to leap to her sandaled feet, take a hearty belt from her omnipresent drink, and bellow out a great bleat of anger.
The review-writer asserted that “we feel confided in” with Carroll. “I don’t know precisely how Miss Carroll is able to do it, but she manages—without any effort at all—to make us share Gertrude Stein’s attitude toward herself.”
In the end, Kerr concluded, having invoked a housekeeper famous for her outstanding souffles, “Miss Carroll’s own souffle is very choice indeed. Superb texture, body and lightness both, four‐star anywhere, I’d say.”
Don Nelsen asserted in the New York Daily News that in Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein, “Martin’s script and Carroll’s performance make a perfect match and Milton Moss’ evenly paced direction is skillful, indeed.”
The Daily News reviewer proclaimed that “Pat Carroll has recreated [Stein] with remarkable fidelity and dimension. She catches Stein’s snobbery, pettiness, perception, loyalty and wit and at the same time tells the story of an artistic revolution.”
Nelsen concluded, “I have never thought of Gertrude Stein as a particularly enchanting person but if she was anything like Carroll’s portrait, she must have been.”
“Wonderful wonderful wonderful is the phrase for Pat Carroll doing ‘Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein’ off-Broadway at the Circle Repertory Theater,” wrote Mary Campbell of the Associated Press in the Philadelphia Inquirer. She was one of the many journalists who found it irresistible to mimic Stein’s triple-ese.
The AP reviewer continued: “Gertrude Stein calls herself a genius, and Miss Carroll makes that—and everything else—believable.”
“She tells an anecdote richly . . .,” Campbell added. “She delightedly sets out insights and one-line quips. She has a remarkable mind that makes one wish to have known her.”
In a later edition of the paper, Philadelphia Inquirer staff writer Barbara Kantrowitz commented that Carroll “dominates the theater’s small stage . . . . She raises name-dropping to a fine art.” Kantrowitz prefaced this remark by asserting that “both the actress and her subject have gained new images.”
The Hollywood Reporter’s Charles Ryweck observed that “‘Gertrude Stein etc.’ may be a one-character play but it evokes an entire gallery of the titans of modern art and literature . . . .” Playwright Martin, Ryweck added, “has revealed [Stein’s] personality through the art of the raconteur.”
“Carroll,” the HR reviewer felt, “is a fascinating actress, funny, yet piercing . . . .”
She is a mesmerizing actress as Gertrude and was rewarded with a standing ovation by an appreciative opening night audience. Milton Moss directed the ebullient Carroll with flair.”
In the Allentown, Pennsylvania, Morning Call, William A. Raidy of the Newhouse News Service asserted, “The avant-garde writer would be both pleased and flattered by Pat Carroll’s charming portrayal of her in . . . ‘Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein.’”
Martin’s play “is a warm, intimate portrait of the woman from Allegheny, Pa., who from her armchair in a Paris studio encouraged such young artists as Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso and a whole Lost Generation of writers.”
“Martin rarely directly quotes his subject,” explained Raidy. “Instead, he lets her tell her story as seen through her relationships with others . . . . He makes, therefore, Miss Stein perhaps a bit more likeable—and modest—than she actually was.”
“Pat Carroll’s Gertrude Stein laughs a lot,” pointed out the Newhouse reviewer.
Reading most of the Stein canon, we never thought Miss Stein the laugh riot actress Carroll portrays. Then we came across this evaluation from her old friend, [literary critic, biographer, and historian] Van Wyck Brooks [1886-1963]: “Gertrude’s personality was magnetic; she had a laugh from the middle of her . . . .”
“More than anything else,” felt Raidy, “Pat Carroll has captured the physical sense of Gertrude Stein in this one-woman show.” The review-writer concluded with the observation “what a pleasure it is to be reminded of [Stein’s] very special genius with the help of Pat Carroll.”
Calling Carroll’s performance “brilliant” and labeling it the “undisputed highpoint of her career,” Variety’s Madd. (the reviewing “sig.,” or pseudonym, for John Madden) characterized GS3 as “an intelligently drawn, poignant, often hilarious, entertaining, thoughtful, instructive, and most of all exhilarating theatre experience.”
“Milton Moss has staged the work with authority,” continued Madden, “but obviously allows Carroll the freedom of instinct.” Quoting the Circle Rep program for the play, the Variety reviewer wrote, Carroll “was determined to make the world of Gertrude Stein, once again, come alive.”
Madden added, “To that purpose Carroll has perhaps exceeded even her own expectations, with a performance that illuminates the stage throughout two acts and ranks among the best of the solo theatre pieces offered over the last decade or so.”
“Carroll,” the reviewer continued, “brings such warmth and personal appeal to the role, as well as a marvelous gift for story telling, the audience becomes immediately intrigued with the gossip and friendly intimacies she reveals . . . . A lengthy and hilarious tale about a near disastrous dinner party she attended, is a highlight of her impeccable delivery.”
In Long Island’s Newsday, Allan Wallach, dubbing the play a “tour de force” for Carroll, reported, “Her triumph is so complete that the theater piece has become a surprise hit of the summer . . . .” In explanation, Wallach said, “What Carroll has done to bring all this about is, simply, turn herself into Gertrude Stein at every performance.
The words of the play aren’t Stein’s, as we’ve seen, “but the actress invests them with Stein’s enthusiasm and rhythms. The intelligence and humor—and occasionally a haunting sadness—shine through.”
Proclaiming that Stein “has been made, finally and inevitably, the center of an enormously fascinating play,” Ernest Albrecht wrote in the New Brunswick, New Jersey, Home News, “In the person of Pat Carroll she is also the play’s sides, top and bottom.” The actress, he wrote, “is giving a performance of enormous energy and magnetism.”
“This is a real play,” the review-writer admonished us, “that happens to have as its one and only character a figure from real life. It is a work created for the stage out of all the things the stage finds most useful.”
“Miss Carroll is seated at the center of the famous room at 27 Rue de Fleur[u]s, Paris, for virtually the entire evening. . . . But,” observed the man from the Home News, “from this throne-like seat, Miss Carroll miraculously creates a[n] evening that always seems alive and active. She tells the stories brilliantly.”
“Miss Carroll plays with the language as if it were a musical instrument. Her stories are oral impressionistic paintings and the glimpse into the ego are startling revelations of vulnerability,” affirmed Albrecht.
He didn’t spare his praise: “If you want a model of stunning acting by which to judge all other such attempts, do visit Miss Carroll at the Provincetown Playhouse. So much of what passes for acting in other enterprises merely seems so much ranting and raving in comparison.”
The Home News reviewer concluded by stating, “All of which adds up to an enormously varied evening that treats us as [her] intellectual and emotional equal. What greater tribute can an artist pay her audience?”
“With Miss Carroll playing [Stein], it is sometimes difficult to remember that it is, after all, only a play,” continued Albrecht. “She makes it seem like a private soiree.”
As readers can see, the reviews all hit much the same notes. These were all notices of the performances in New York City, either at Circle Rep or the Provincetown, but the reviews of the tour dates were in the same vein. So, I’ll stop here—with two exceptions. The first is a review of the Caedmon recording (TRS 367) of the play, released in September 1980, about a month after the play’s New York run ended.
In the New York Times, Paul Kresh, an author, critic, record producer, and broadcaster who specialized in spoken-word recordings, advised, “Plays for one or two performers not only make for economical stage productions but are ideally suited to the recording medium.”
Kresh labeled the two-disk, stereo release “Pat Carroll’s tour-de-force monologue.” Having seen the live performance, the record reviewer acknowledged,
It was a joy to watch Miss Carroll . . . thronging the stage with the ghosts of the great as she reminisced on a rainy afternoon in her studio about life in Paris at 27 rue de Fleurus. You could swear that Alice B. Toklas was really napping away all the while in the next room! Yet, little is lost when you only hear this performer, since most of the delights of Mr. Martin’s compelling script are in the flow of language that illuminates character as the formidable Stein recalls her adventures, her quarrels with her brother Leo, her love affair with modern art, and her attempts to make language do what Picasso was doing on canvas.
Kresh made a side note to say that compared to a recording of Stein’s actual voice, “Pat Carroll has caught its cadences and even its timbre without resorting to slavish mimicry.”
The other outlier is a review in the Hartford (Connecticut) Courant of the 1982 television broadcast of the play on CBS Cable. (The telecast ran two hours, rather than the 90 minutes of the stage version.) Owen McNally, the paper’s television critic, described GS3 as “a good play, a good play, a good play” (I warned you about the triple-ese) and credited Carroll’s “tour de force performance.”
“It is a one-woman monologue,” McNally explained, “with Carroll pulling out all the stops” in what he called Martin’s “imaginary monologue.” The TV reviewer characterized Carroll’s work as a “vivid, earthy performance,” presenting “a very bold, flesh-and-blood Gertrude Stein, a Stein running over with brilliance as raconteur and writer.”
“Although most sympathetic,” warned McNally, “this is not a totally idealized representation of Stein.” The reviewer added (as we recall what Anita Loos revealed), “What you get in this two-act monologue is no mere ‘Saint for Two Acts.’ Stein also comes across as at least a bit of a bitch.”
The Courant writer reported, “The play itself is all but totally static. Yet Carroll makes it come very much to life by generating static electricity that lights up the Stein character. . . . The words—the words made flesh by Carroll—are the real action.”
(Stein wrote the libretto to an opera with music composed by Virgil Thomson entitled Four Saints in Three Acts, 1927-28. She also wrote a libretto, often performed as an avant-garde play, called Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, 1938—but I think that apparent reference is inadvertent.)
I will also quote a few passages from one of the tour-stop reviews because it was the only one I read that had anything negative to say about GS3. James Lardner’s Washington Post notice was generally laudatory, especially regarding Pat Carroll’s performance (the piece’s headline was: “On Stage: Fierce, Convincing ‘Gertrude Stein.’”)
The WaPo reviewer, who saw the show at Washington’s Arena Stage two months after it left the Provincetown, found that Martin’s script “succeeds in making Stein an absorbing and sympathetic figure,” but “is much less successful in its structure and selection of material.”
Carroll is constantly forced to jump from one subject to another . . . . And there is no compelling dramatic reason behind Stein’s speaking to us from the mid-1930s: The story doesn’t build to any ’30s climax, and indeed sweeps through the ’20s . . . with alarming briskness.
Lardner, however, immediately returned to his complimentary assessment of the play, which he dubbed “a highly entertaining excursion to a unique time and place,” and especially Carroll’s acting, which, he proclaimed “is the bottom-line reason to see this show.”
In Carroll’s bio in the Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein program, the actress made a statement, part of which the Variety reviewer quoted. The rest of Carroll’s thought reads: “personalizing history through Gertrude Stein is a fantasy come true.” I’m thrilled that it did and I got to share in it. It’s remained indelibly engraved on my memory for 43 years . . . and counting.
[Thinking about the possibility of other negative reviews of Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein aside from a brief passage in the Washington Post notice, I wondered what John Simon might have written in New York magazine. In my original searches, I never found a New York review, so I made a search specifically directed at finding one.
[It looks as if Simon may not have written a full review, but penned the blurb New York used in its theater listing for GS3. It doesn't have his name attached, but it sounds like him and the abstract/citation on one database points to it if you look for “John Simon” and "Pat Carroll."
[(Wouldn’t you know that the first use of the blurb in question—there was another text in the theater guide in earlier issues—appears in an issue that follows one that’s missing from the database of complete issues. If there was a full review from which the blurb was excerpted, the frequent practice, it'd probably be in that missing issue. I’ll try to remember to check in a library my next opportunity.)
[So, to complete the record, here’s what the “anonymous” critiquer of New York magazine said about Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein:
The Gertrude Stein that emerges is, unlike the title, far from triple—only a third. She is less formidable, much more easygoing than the original. The comedienne Pat Carroll plays her heroine with verve, variety, and finesse, but Marty Martin’s monodrama simplifies, falsifies, and vulgarizes the life and times and works of Ms. Stein.
[Assuming this is John Simon, I’m not sure how he would know “the original” Gertrude Stein—though he was 20 when she died. I don’t know, though, that he was in Paris at the time. We’ve heard in the testimony of people who knew, or at least met, her, that Stein presented a different face in person and in private than she did in her writing.
[Besides, as Carroll and
Martin both repeated, GS3
isn’t a history lesson, it’s theater. It
isn’t presenting historical truth, but theatrical truth—and, however the New
York reviewer felt about Martin’s dramaturgy, he praised Carroll’s acting.]
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