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Do Let Us Go Away. A Play

by Gertrude Stein

Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters

an opera, text by Gertrude Stein, music by Ned Rorem
review by Brad Rosenstein

SF Bay Guardian (May 6, 1998)
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GERTRUDE Stein's Do Let Us Go Away, A Play is one of a series of plays written during a year (1915-16) that Stein and Alice B. Toklas spent in Majorca. As World War I raged, Stein and Toklas escaped the grim battles and air raids in France for a relatively idyllic existence in the Mediterranean. The play eschews Stein's characteristic Dr. Seuss-with-Tourette's syndrome language patterns, offering instead an arrangement of banal non sequiturs from everyday life.

Like a cubist postcard, Do Let Us Go Away contains scraps of Majorcan encounters with French servants, English neighbors, dancing Spanish peasants, and the hated Germans, as well as distressing war news and marital squabbles between Gertrude and Alice. But as always in Stein, all these voices are really her own, a fact cleverly registered by director and designer John Sowle, who makes all seven women in his ensemble into Stein clones. With their cropped hair, matronly vests, and sensible shoes, they become fragments and channelers of Stein's unique sensibility.

The ebb and flow of voices is more a babble than a brook, but Sowle has hooked into the essential musicality of Stein's language: the only real subjects are the rhythm of the voice and the international crossroads of words that inform the Majorcan topography. The cast attempts to find emotional subtexts in the elliptical banter with varying degrees of success. Janet Ward as the narrator, Kathryn Trask as the sly Toklas figure, and Jenna Logan, with her stentorian tones, seem most in tune with the piece.

The more rewarding half of the evening was the melodrama Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters, made into a chamber opera by Ned Rorem. A group of children embark on a murder game with such seriousness that a true mystery results. Stein's childlike playfulness informs honest and funny portraits of the five children as they veer between ebullience, brutality, terror, boredom, and psychosexual tension.

Stein often works best with music, and Rorem's score is in perfect, witty harmony with her words. Linda Noble sings splendidly as ringleader Jenny, and Jonathan Nadel does bright work as her prowling antagonist. Director and designer Steven Patterson has given the piece a Victorian staging à la Edward Gorey that's ideal for its friskily macabre tone. The result is an absolute charmer that make-believes so well it calls reality into question, even its own.

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