With “Four Saints in Three Acts,” the actor David Greenspan brings his high-affect technique to Gertrude Stein, and she both gives way and resists.
It’s perhaps easiest to describe the Lucille Lortel production of “Four Saints in Three Acts,” starring David Greenspan, by saying what it is not. For one thing, it’s not at the Lortel, which is in Manhattan, but at an experimental theatre in Brooklyn. Nor is it really a play—there are elliptical references to scenes and scenarios but no dramatic dialogue.
Stein’s spare, Cubist language—full of puns and children’s rhymes , sideways allusions, and an insistent present tense—often leaves readers and listeners at sea. “Pigeons large pigeons on the shorter longer yellow grass alas pigeons on the grass,” Greenspan says to his puzzled audience. The feline sixty-six-year-old actor moves like a melodrama villain who trained with Martha Graham, and his exaggerations and stylizations offer tantalizing glimpses of story.
Now he brings his high-affect technique to Stein, and she both gives way and resists. Without Thomson’s composition to lean on, Greenspan must rely on his own lacquered cadences, which run the gamut from James Mason-ish purrs to tinny yelps. The first, long section whirls by entertainingly, buoyed by Greenspan’s impish charm, but eventually our incomprehension slows and roughens the experience, changing it into . . . something else.
Greenspan tells us about an oddly erotic Saint Therese , who is “half in and half out of doors,” and the action, what there is of it, eddies around her: “There are a great many places and persons near together. Saint Therese not young and younger but visited like the others by some, who are frequently going there.
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