Word: stein
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Pasadena's thriving Playhouse had what was locally termed an "event" last week. While 400 customers were turned away, 850 squeezed in to witness the world premiere of Gertrude Stein's Yes Is for a Very Young...
Playwright Stein (Four Saints in Three Acts) had, as usual, not truckled to the conventions. Though her play dealt with life in France during the occupation, it was largely undramatic-a succession of scenes that snapped their fingers at continuity, pace and mounting impact. The dialogue was typical Stein-like something written for the hard of hearing...
Complicated & Simple. Yet, if fuzzy, Yes was by no means foolish. In its chip-shot fashion, it possibly came closer to revealing a French family disrupted by clashing political loyalties than something more dynamic and excitable would have done. Playwright Stein, who spent the war among such people, wanted "the audience to realize that French families were divided as our American families were divided in the Civil War, and it is complicated and simple." In Yes, Henry and his young brother Ferdinand become part of the Resistance; Henry's wife and her aristocratic family are pro-Pétain...
...best thing about Yes is its hard, humorous understanding and worldly wisdom. Playwright Stein ridicules rather than berates the Pétainists, particularly when they try at the end to come over to the winning side. Notably Gallic is her mention of the collaborationist shopkeeper who was dead sure the Germans would win but had kept his assortment of little French, British and U.S. flags-just in case. Miss Stein jabs at obedience ("Obedient people must sooner or later follow a bad leader") and at discipline ("It is the unsuccessful people in the world who want to discipline everybody...
...briar patch of angry, tangled pen strokes; a Picasso drawing of two nudes which looked like sacks of coal (and another which might have been a doodle by Raphael); Group of Draped Standing Figures (headless) by British Sculptor Henry Moore; a wildly sketched, toad-faced "Conqueror" hoisting a stein of beer, by Mexican José Clemente Orozco. But even Ingres might have been willing to admit the simplicity and tenderness of Sculptor Brancusi's three huddled Infants...