A Spell of Words

By G.C.

GERTRUDE STEIN GERTRUDE STEIN GERTRUDE STEIN

by Marty Martin

It is a rainy day at 27 Rue de Fleurus, and Alice, who does not like wet weather, is asleep in her bedroom. Her companion, however, is not the moody type.

Lighting up a cheroot and pouring her self something cold, she eases her large bulk into a chair and begins to talk about herself and her friends: Pablo and Ernest, Scott and Henri. Both Henris, in fact, Matisse and Rousseau. Quickly, magically, the audience is gathered into her net of words and realizes what it must have been like to sit opposite Gertrude Stein in her Paris apartment on a stormy day in 1938, when this conversation is supposed to have taken place.

As portrayed by Pat Carroll in this one-woman show at Greenwich Village's Circle Repertory, Gertrude is domineering, boastful and vain. But she is also vulnerable and, to those who know her only by reputation, surprisingly funny. Carroll, who commissioned Marty Martin to write a Stein monologue, captures her earthy humor as well as her wit. But at the same time, she conveys the pathos of being fat, female and homosexual in the early part of the 20th century.

Martin has constructed the play so skillfully that past and present join to form an artful mosaic. Though they never appear onstage, all those close to Stein, particularly her brother Leo and her lover Alice B. Toklas, are given life by her recounting. To help her memorize her difficult role, Carroll sought the help of a hypnotist. If this mesmerizing performance is any guide, she appears to have learned the hypnotist's art herself. --G.C.

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