Yale Bulletin and Calendar

February 14, 2003|Volume 31, Number 18

Yale undergraduates star in the campus production of "Four Saints in Three Acts," a play by Gertrude Stein with music by Virgil Thomson.

Production of rarely seen play
celebrates expatriates' collaboration

Yale will celebrate the unique partnership of writer Gertrude Stein and composer Virgil Thomson with a production of "Four Saints in Three Acts" Wednesday-Friday, Feb. 1921.

Sponsored by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and by Jonathan Edwards College, the work will be performed by Yale undergraduates with cameo appearances by University faculty.

The production team of musical director Richard Lalli, artistic director and designer Matthew Suttor, choreographer Bronwen Mac Arthur and assistant director Alex Yang are collaborating to bring a new vision of the work to the stage.

As famous for the friends who frequented her salon in Paris as she is for her literary output, Stein wrote the play on which the work is based in 1927. Thomson, a fellow American expatriate studying composition in Paris at the time, wrote the music.

Yale is a logical place to stage the rarely performed play, say organizers, because the Beinecke Library houses the Stein Papers -- which include paintings of her, two of her waistcoats and a pair of fireplace chairs -- and the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library at Yale has the Thomson Papers.

According to Timothy Young, assistant curator of modern books and manuscripts at the Beinecke and the dramaturg for the play, "Four Saints in Three Acts" was written as a play and later turned into an opera. It is, he notes, neither about four saints -- he reckons dozens of holy personages make their way on the stage in the course of the work -- nor does it take place in three acts.

Stein, notes Young, could not herself say what the play was "about" in terms of a story line. Rather, he says, "Four Saints" is "simply a landscape populated by things and pieces of things."

Stein's synopsis of the action is: "Act I is scenes from the life of Saint Teresa of Avila. Act II is a garden party in the country near Barcelona. Act III is about Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Act IV is the memory of the other saints and the ending."

Thomson, who was a student of famed composition teacher Nadia Boulanger in Paris, set Stein's words to music that is modern yet reflective of American musical traditions. Foxtrots, folk dances and Protestant hymns are heard throughout the score.

The play premiered as the inaugural event of the Avery Memorial Theatre of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, on Feb. 8, 1934.

"Four Saints in Three Acts" will be performed four times at the theater in Holcomb T. Green Hall, 1156 Chapel St. There are performances at 8 p.m. Feb. 19-21 and a 5 p.m. show on Feb. 20.

Tickets are free, but reservations have been filled. To put your name on a waiting list for unclaimed tickets, to be given away 10 minutes before each show, send e-mail to megan.stern@yale.edu.

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