THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022 75
section whirls by entertainingly, buoyed
by Greenspan’s impish charm, but even-
tually our incomprehension slows and
roughens the experience, changing it
into ... something else.
T
hese days, Stein, the mother of
modernism, is much referred to—
as a queer forebear, a saloniste, a friend
of Picasso’s, a literary provocateur—but
her approximately seventy-five plays
are rarely produced. When they are, it’s
often with music, such as the composer
Heather Christian’s 2014 score for the
children’s work “The World Is Round.”
(Music makes the medicine go down.)
When “Saints” was first performed, in
1934, John Houseman, who went on to
form the Mercury Theatre with Orson
Welles, directed a Gesamtkunstwerk from
a spectacular scenario given to him by
Thomson. (It was only “accepted” by
Stein.) Featuring an all-Black cast, it
roiled with action and visual event: pic-
nicking and parading saints, Florine
Stettheimer’s glowing cellophane cy-
clorama, dances by Frederick Ashton,
and Thomson’s music, which married
contemporary dissonance to Gregorian
chant. Greenspan, though, indulges in
no such embellishments. He speaks
only what’s on Stein’s page, including
lines, such as “Repeat First Act,” that
might be stage directions.
Greenspan tells us about an oddly
erotic Saint Therese (which happens
to be one of the author’s nicknames for
her lover, Alice B. Toklas), who is “half
in and half out of doors,” and the ac-
tion, what there is of it, eddies around
her: “There are a great many places and
persons near together. Saint Therese
not young and younger but visited like
the others by some, who are frequently
going there.” When saints arrive, Green-
span gives them each a recognizable
attitude, sometimes borrowed from
canonical paintings: Saint Ignatius
holds his hands up as if making his
way through a fog; Stein’s fictional Saint
Chavez mimes shouldering a bindle
and assumes an aw-shucks optimism.
(Greenspan creates dozens of distinct
personae this way.) At the same time,
the narration gives us a bright, f lat,
modernist landscape of the mind, where
language tolls like bells. “All Saints.
Settled all in all saints. Saints. Saints
settled saints settled all in all saints. All
saints. Saints in all saints.”
How much of this can we parse?
Greenspan and his director and fre-
quent collaborator, Ken Rus Schmoll,
include a quote from Stein in the pro-
gram: “If you enjoy it you understand
it.” (She was chiding an interviewer
who asked her about intelligibility.)
This question of enjoyment is a keen
one. Stein’s insistent in-the-moment-
ness requires huge infusions of energy
and attention: it’s not as if a plot en-
gine is going to roll the show forward.
My own internal negotiations with the
event included annoyance, boredom,
delight, surprise, distraction, and then
a quick blaze of love. There is mean-
ing, too; but it arrives obliquely. “There
can be no peace on earth with calm,”
Greenspan says. That sentence is not
hermetic at all—it’s a rallying cry.
Stein was concerned that audiences
seemed to experience drama in what
she called “syncopated time.” Our emo-
tions during a conventional play run
either ahead of or behind the immedi-
ate action—we remember the charac-ters’ pasts or predict their futures. So
how, she asked, can we let go of that
distraction and experience events now?
How can art place us in the present?
Greenspan’s own innate lightness is
useful in answering that—particularly
the way he tells us, waggishly, that the
show runs ninety minutes. (Do we be-
lieve him?) He and Stein vibrate on the
same ecstatic frequency, and his sense
of humor rhymes with hers, particu-
larly when he’s flicking an imaginary
robin off his finger as Saint Therese.
(What does not interest her does not
interest her.) In fact, his methods and
Stein’s are so in accord that they risk
becoming redundant. Greenspan’s styl-
izations ran thrillingly counter to the
warmth of Conners and to the lugu-
briousness of O’Neill, but here he comes
close to seeming like Stein’s priest.
All this means is that the show is
occasionally difficult, just as a church
service can be. Nearly a hundred years
after Stein wrote it, “Saints” has not
staled or softened. Even though I am
bewitched by Stein, and by Greenspan,
and by Greenspan doing Stein, I still
found myself needing to enforce some
mental discipline. About an hour into
the performance, my attention started
to slacken. (In my notes, I wrote, “Re-
commit!,” and then kept underlining
it.) This is Stein’s and Greenspan’s way
of using time, or, rather, of teaching
us to use time. It’s theatre as medita-
tive discipline. One must deliberately
choose the show over other tempta-
tions: one must choose to listen. So we
chose. We were choosing there. In a
way, we are still choosing, with a great
many saints there, who are choosing
there together. THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT ©2022 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
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