Theatre in Review: Composition...Master-Pieces...Identity (Target Margin Theatre/Connelly Theatre)

	David Greenspan. Photo: Erik Carter

As part of its celebration of Gertrude Stein, Target Margin is presenting David Greenspan in an evening of the author's lesser-known writings. The bill includes "Composition as Explanation," a lecture given at the Cambridge Literary Club and Oxford University in 1926; "What are Master-Pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them?," a lecture delivered at Oxford in 1936, and "Identity A Poem," written in 1935 for the puppeteer Donald Vestal and first performed in 1936 at the National Puppetry Conference in Detroit.

The presentation, with a production design by Carolyn Mraz, couldn't be simpler: It consists of Greenspan, a table and chair, a white cyc, and some marvelously subtle lighting by Tláloc López-Watermann. Interestingly, the house lights remain up throughout the show -- creating a clean, uncluttered environment for Stein's often mandarin prose style. Admittedly a blank slate as far as Stein's prose is concerned, I attended Composition...Master-Pieces...Identity with some trepidation. My fears were not entirely allayed when Greenspan launched into the following paragraph:

"There is singularly nothing that makes a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking. By this I mean so simply that anybody knows it that composition is the difference which makes each and all of them then different from other generations and this is what makes everything different otherwise they are all alike and everybody knows it because everybody says it."

It's fair to say that I found "Composition as Explanation" almost totally incomprehensible. At the same time, Greenspan's mastery of the text is astonishing, and little bits of prose amused throughout: "No one is ahead of his time." (That gives one pause for thought.) "The creator of a new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic." (How often I have noticed that.) "Beauty is beauty even when it is irritating and stimulating not only when it is accepted and classic." By the way, all of these statements are taken from much longer, and largely unpunctuated, sentences, making even more remarkable Greenspan's ability to parse them into like intelligible sentences.

By the time Greenspan launched into the second piece, "Why Are There So Few Master-Pieces," I had become fascinated with his ability to move into Stein's prose, with its circular and gnomic sentences, giving us a sense of the progression of her thought and her impish humor. Explaining why she wrote out her lecture instead of speaking informally, she announces, "Therefore I was going to talk to you but actually it is impossible to talk about master-pieces and what they are because talking essentially has nothing to do with creation." This lecture is more accessible -- indeed, it sounds like an early manifesto, in English, anyway, of formalist art criticism, which insists that artworks stand alone, untethered to the identity of the artist or the social conditions under which they created. Still, Greenspan's exceptionally lucid delivery carries one along, and, once again, the text glitters with little gems: "It is not the way Hamlet reacts to his father's ghost that makes the master-piece, he might have reacted according to Shakespeare in a dozen other ways and everybody would have been as much impressed by the psychology of it."(That comment alone takes a lot of nerve.) "The painter can no longer say that what he does is as the world looks to him because he cannot look at the world any more, it has been photographed too much and he has to say that he does something else." (You wonder what Stein would make of the information- and image-soaked contemporary world.) "The minute your memory functions while you are doing anything it may be very popular but actually it is dull. And that is what a master-piece is not, it may be unwelcome but it is never dull." Whatever else you may say about this evening, it isn't dull.

"Identity A Poem" finds Stein fooling around with the notion of identity, allowing Greenspan to playfully strike a variety of poses while giving full reign to the author's distinctive word music. Next to the other pieces, it seems a tad slight, but once again one can marvel at how, with a total economy of means, the actor makes the author's words his own. I don't think I've ever seen Greenspan in such a relaxed and joyful mood; he even chats with audience members before the show and during the intermission. He also conceived this evening, which is clearly a labor of love.

Necessarily a show for a limited audience, Composition... Master-Pieces...Identity would seem to be a must for any fan of Stein's writing. It also provides an interesting and relatively accessible introduction for the neophyte. (Also, check out the amusing artwork in the lobby, in which Stein's face is rendered using coins and multicolored candies, among other objects.). On its own highly singular terms, Composition...Master-Pieces...Identity can be considered a success. -- David Barbour