With dazzling online recordings and scripts, <i>Radio Free Stein</i> takes readers backstage to reveal the inventive workshop process Adam Frank has used in productions of Gertrude Stein’s early voice plays. The 1934 NBC radio interview Stein gave on her US tour resonated with her playwriting “by making audience available as feeling” and Frank brilliantly renders this insight in productions that capture the plays’ strange and arresting illocutionary force."—Linda Voris, American University <p>“<i>Radio Free Stein</i>’s fluent roving across considerations of performance, psychoanalytic theorization of the radio, and philosophical and queer theories of the performative is brilliant and compelling. This is a significant contribution to both Stein studies and modern theater studies, as well as media and modernist studies.”—E. L. McCallum, Michigan State University</p>
What happens when we listen to Gertrude Stein’s plays as radio and music theater? This book explores the sound of Stein’s theater and proposes that radio, when approached both historically and phenomenologically, offers technical solutions to her texts’ unique challenges. Adam J. Frank documents the collaborative project of staging Stein’s early plays and offers new critical interpretations of these lesser-known works. Radio Free Stein grapples with her innovative theater poetics from a variety of disciplinary perspectives: sound and media studies, affect and object relations theory, linguistic performativity, theater scholarship, and music composition.
Essay 1: Gertrude Stein's Radio Audience
Interlude 1: What Happened | Plays - a radio script
Essay 2: Speech, Acts, Parlor Plays: Stein with Austin
Interlude 2: What Happened | Plays - a score (Samuel Vriezen)
Essay 3: Composing What Happened (Samuel Vriezen)
Appendix: Recording and Performance
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments