Last Operas and Plays

In the more than 75 plays Gertrude Stein wrote between 1913 and 1946, she envisioned a new dramaturgy, beginning with the pictorial conception of a play as a landscape. She drew into her plays the daily flow of life around her - including the natural world - and turned cities, villages, parts of the dramatic structure, and even her own friends into characters. She made punctuation and typography part of her compositional style and chose words for their joyful impact as sound and wordplay. For Stein, the writing process itself was always important in developing the "continuous present" at the heart of her work. "Last Operas and Plays" contains many of Stein's most important and most-produced works. As a special feature, it also includes her essay "Plays", in which she reflects on the experience in the theatre of seeing and hearing, and on emotion and time.