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| Gay Nathan & Lois Viscoli Limn Endearing Stein & Toklas in Win Wells Play |
by Bruce-Michael Gelbert
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| Lois Viscoli and Gay Nathan |
| Photo by Joseph R. Saporito |
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Gay Nathan, of Santa Fe and Cherry Grove, and colleague Lois Viscoli limned warm, endearing portraits of 'mothers of us all,' writer Gertrude Stein and her life partner Alice B. Toklas, in Win Wells' witty and moving play, "Gertrude Stein and a Companion," presented at Cherry Grove's Community House, under the auspices of the Arts Project of Cherry Grove, on June 16. Watching them made one feel as if it were Gertrude and Alice, with their 39 years together, who had taught us all how to have loving relationships. Scott Harrison was the director, who elicited the memorable portrayals from the performers, and Julie Paradise, Gay's significant other, was the stage manager.
"Gertrude Stein and a Companion" takes its title from a remark, meant to belittle both Toklas and the relationship, made to no avail by writer and sometime Stein protégé Ernest Hemingway, with whom the couple had a complicated, multifaceted relationship. Played in a room, its wall lined with paintings, in Stein and Toklas' home at 27 Rue de Fleurus, in Paris, the work's action begins in 1946, on the day of Gertrude's death from inoperable cancer-Alice's almost incredulous lament, "Gertrude Stein died this morning," and Gertrude's matter-of-fact rebuttal, "Dead is dead," are recurring refrains-and their story, from their meeting in 1907, to Alice's death in 1967, after 21 years of widowhood, is told, aptly nonlinearly, in flashbacks and flash forwards. In many scenes, the actors' Gertrude and Alice convincingly carried on conversations they continued to have well after Gertrude's death.
Gay's Gertrude's declaration a century ago that she cares for Lois' Alice and hopes that Alice cares for her, making them responsible for each other and as good as wedded, was but one scene, played with magnificent understatement, that warmed the heart. They were clearly perfect for one another.
The well-known quotable quotes and famous incidents were all there and strong opinions both women maintained were voiced. Prominently placed was Pablo Picasso's painting of Gertrude Stein, the one that engendered her protest that she did not look like that and his prophetic response, "But you will," and later made a wrenching exit from Alice's life, per Gertrude's last will and testament, to be placed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where it resides to this day. Covered, too, are the couple's contentious dealings with Gertrude's family. Stein's way with words was akin to Picasso's cubist approach to painting and her brother, Leo Stein, impersonated by Viscoli, dismissed the unconventional work of both as "hemorrhoids." Stein's family later meanly cheated Alice, arthritic, almost blind and close to 90, out of her inheritance of the remaining paintings. Some had already sold to finance the American publication of Gertrude's writing, a project Alice had aggressively spearheaded.
We saw Nathan's Stein, egged on by Viscoli's Toklas, returning to America, after 30 years' absence, to lecture and explain that she knew that "A rose is a rose is a rose" was not the way people spoke in conversation, but assert that her sentence vividly made that rose red "for the first time in 500 years of English literature." We heard Stein's inimitable deathbed remark, responding to her own "What is the answer?" with "What is the question?"
In short, Gay Nathan and Lois Viscoli, in Wells' play, under Harrison's direction, made this remarkable couple, living openly together decades before Stonewall, knowing each other so well that Stein could pen "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas" and Toklas could acquiesce to it, live anew for us. I wondered, at one point, if anyone was present who had actually met Stein and Toklas and, seated in the front row at the earlier of the two shows, was Grove nonagenarian Glen Boles, who had indeed.
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