Professional Documents
Culture Documents
by Gertrude Stein
Directed by Jennifer Miller
A Word of Welcome
Gertrude Steins The Mother of Us All reminds us that the theater
is a time machineand a space machine, too. If youre not sure
what we mean by this, we invite you to let go of trying to make
sense. Right here in the theater, right now, as you read this. Let
go of linear time. Let go of characters names. Let go of sentences that start and end in the same place. To let go is not to surrender meaningafter all, Steins play is rich with history, political
arguments, jokes, innuendos, and relationships. Instead, think of
letting go as a method for watching, a different way to experience
language and meaning in this semi-abstract performance. This
wild pageant.
Stein, an extraordinarily innovative writer and central participant
in the Modernist movement, wrote The Mother of Us All as a
libretto for an opera by Virgil Thomson. It was first performed in
1947, nearly a year after Steins death. Luckily, Stein wrote herself
and Thomson into the play as characters, so she appeared in the
first production, just as she appears in Pratts rendering tonight.
Which brings us back to The Mother of Us All as a time (and
space) machine. In the play, Stein draws characters from her life,
from her imagination, and from various points in history. Central,
of course, is Susan B. Anthony, that lifelong fighter in the Womens Suffrage movement. Like many suffragists, Anthony started
public life in the abolitionist movement. As The Mother touches
on brieflyand as our dramaturges explore in depthscarce
resources and deep-seated racism drove the movements for
Black and (implicitly white) Womens suffrage apart. We return to
this play, then, as a complex legacy, with deep hopes of opening
intersectional conversations about how these strugglesand representational strategiesare alive with us today.
Director Jennifer Miller meets Stein on her (seemingly) austere
terrain, bringing her own artistic and political lineage to the stage.
Youll recognize a dash of the big, campy flamboyance from Millers work as the founding director of Circus Amok, where comedia
del arte and agit prop mingle with moves from downtown theater
and avant-garde dance.
Are you still with us? We admit that Gertrudes playful, wry,
careening language may have altered our ability to write in a
straight linebut straight lines are over rated. Were just getting
warmed up.
PERFORMER BIOS
Nina Nakamura
Nina is a senior at Pratt. She was born in Japan, and she
moved to the United States in 8th grade. Spending her
high school life in Michigan, she went to Pratt Institute in
New York to study illustration. Her hobby is to sneakily
photograph her surrounding people. She had never experienced live performance since she did once at an elementary school. Her first intentions to take the play course was
to learn something about costume and setting designs, in
which she was really interested, but during the semester she
learned many ways of expressing language through literature, sound, gesture, etc.
Tess Kind
Hailing from Philadelphia, Tess is a senior sculpture major
here at Pratt. In preschool, Tess was cast as the narrator
of the play The Three Billy Goats Gruff, and she feels that
performance helped catapult her towards this role as orator
Daniel Webster. Although it has been difficult to embody
Daniels arrogance and obtuse views, Tess has had a lot of
fun working on this play. It has been an honor to work with
such an amazing cast and crew.
Jordan Perz
Jordan Perz has been working in theatre on and offstage
since middle school and is continuing that through the performance program here at Pratt. This is her first performance
on Memorial Halls stage and hopefully not her last, shes
only finishing her freshmen year so youll definitely see her
again. Jordan majors in film, so if anyone wants to buy her
foundation year supplies contact @jordvnpcrcz.
Sarah Appel
Sarah B. Appel is a graduating poetry undergrad who is in
the process of investigating ways of writing against capital-
Program Notes
Being dramaturgical
writings & research by
LEEANN REED
DAVID MILLER
KESIA A. CAMERON
IAN KELLEY
MORGAN REICHERT
ROBERTINO DEL ROSARIO
ZAI CHAKRANE
conducted in
AMANDA DAVIDSONs
Critical Thinking Course for
Writing Majors at
Pratt Institute
Spring 2016
& further
accompanied by a
POP-UP LIBRARY
IN THE
MEMORIAL HALL LOBBY
LEEANN REED
The fight for womens suffrage in the United States
lasted from the mid-1800s to the 1920s. The play The Mother of Us All by Gertrude Stein highlights the struggles and
controversies that surrounded the womens suffrage movement in the United States. One of the issues the play fails
to expand on is the racism that was prevalent on part of the
white feminists at the time. In the play, Susan B. Anthony
has a brief conversation with a black man:
Susan B: Negro man would you vote if you only can
and not she.
Negro Man: You bet.
Susan B: I fought for you that you could vote would
you vote if they not let me
(Act 2, Scene 3).
This particular interaction briefly shows the tension between
blacks and white feminists during the fight for suffrage.
Many women suffragists were supportive of black rights, but
there was a sense of superiority amongst the white women. A good example of this tension existed between black
journalist and activist Ida B. Wells and Frances E. Willard, a
white suffragist and voice for the Womans Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in the United States.
The WCTU was one of many movements that used
religious morals as a basis of social reform. These groups
came from a revival of religion in the 1820s. They fought not
only for temperance and morality, but fought for the abolishment of slavery. Many women in organizations like the
WCTU had a connection to abolition ("Prohibition"). Over
time the WCTU gained a strong voice but the organizations
leaders were criticized for using it selectively.
At a London temperance meeting in 1893, Wells
spoke about the treatments of blacks in the South and the
injustices that occurred. She shed light on the nature of
lynchings and showed that the wide spread stereotypes
about blacks were completely inaccurate, such as the gen-
DAVID MILLER
Gertrude Stein sure is something, not only because of
her innovative and experimental writing, but as an historical
figure. As the play youre about to witness shows, and as
you could likely guess based on her own gender, Stein was a
supporter of womens rights. But as the play also shows, she
was acutely aware of the problems surrounding the suffrage
movement and its leaders. Based on this information alone,
one could assume that Gertrude Stein was a progressive
person and supporter of social movements that demanded
equality for people of all shapes and sizes. And this may be
true. But then why, as a Jew, a lesbian, and a woman (walk
into a bar) did she surround herself with men like Ernest
Hemingway (a notorious misogynist and mistreater of his
many wives), T. S. Eliot (a well-known anti-Semite), and Ezra
Pound (whose work for the Italian government during WWII
doing radio broadcasts in support of Hitler and in criticism of Franklin D. Roosevelt and of Jews led to his being
charged with treason)?
That these are the companions Stein chose to keep
may come as a surprise, but feels less and less surprising
the more you begin to understand her personal life. Like
her friends, she engaged in affairs despite her long-term
commitment to her partner, and was apathetic at best when
it came to her feelings about the Jews, as the lack of any
reference to her own Jewishness or Jewishness in general in
the play and her friendships with and admirations for powerful members of the collaborationist Vichy government and
the Nazi government itself reflects. Like many great artists,
and like her Modernist contemporaries, Gertrude Stein was
a flawed person, but her influence as a writer knows no
bounds.
MORGAN REICHERT
The nineteenth century was a pivotal time for the
Womens Rights movement. There was a vast effort on the
part of women for the right to vote, even though in the
end they failed to win the vote until some 50 years later.
Throughout the later 1800s, many Womens Rights activists, such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
struggled to find footing for the Womens Suffrage movement side by side with the already turning wheels of Black
(male) Suffrage, eventually abandoning the partnership all
together and campaigning for Womens Suffrage alone.
Because of this splitwhich is often referred to as the saddest divorce in American history (Dudden 3)white women and black men ended up fighting over limited resources.
Figures such as Anthony and Stanton, who had in the past
campaigned with and for Black (male) Suffrage, resorted to
messages of racism in an effort to further their own cause.
Gertrude Steins opera The Mother of Us All follows the first
wave of the Womens Rights movement through the actions
and life of Susan B. Anthony, but Stein fails to bring up the
issue of racism in the movement. There is only a small section of the play that refers to the conflicts between Womens
Suffrage and Black (male) Suffrage. In Act 2, Scene 3 there
is an exchange between Anthony and a black couplewho
are not given namesin which only the man speaks and the
woman remains silent:
Susan B: Negro man would you vote if you only
can and not she.
Negro Man: You bet.
Susan B: I fought for you that you could vote would
you vote if they not let me.
This exchange at first glance may seem like a logical explanation for why Anthony and her followers are not also fighting for Black (male) Suffrage. But looking further than face
value, I realized that this is actually a huge clue in the play to
the racism that came with the first wave of Womens Rights,
because although The Mother of Us All is mostly a historical
opera, it was still written by Gertrude Stein. Stein made the
decisions to not even give the black couple names not to let
the black woman speak, bringing forth her own prejudices
to the stage.
In the beginning, both Womens Suffrage and Black
(male) Suffrage movements worked together toward a
common goal: Suffrage for all. In the 1830s, William Lloyd
Garrison, a white man with a strong belief that all men were
created equal and the leader of the American Anti-Slavery
Society, brought Sarah and Angelina Grimke from South
Carolina forward to testify against slavery. While the two
white women were speaking on behalf of abolition, they
drew obvious parallels between the bondage of slaves
and the subordination of women (Dudden 4). After realizing this, the Grimke sisters started writing and speaking on
behalf of Womens Rights; this is where the movement was
born.
But not everything was the same. Eleanor Flexner,
in her book Century of Struggle, points out many of the
differences between Womens and Black Rights. Bringing
to light the unequal and unethical treatment of both white
women against white men, and between white women and
black slaves of both genders, Flexner writes: The women
kidnapped from city streets, or sold out of crowded prisons
and brought to this country to serve as indentured servants,
had something to look forward to, if they survived: at the
end of seven years they would be freeNo such vision sustained the men and women of dark skins (18). Anthony, as
one of the leading advocates, decided that women should
embrace the old saying go big or go home, and began demanding votes for women. However, the men who Anthony
had been fighting with for Black Rights did not back her up;
they believed that womens suffrage was ahead of its time
and that it was the black mans time to stand front and center. This ultimately pushed Anthony and Stanton to promote
messages of racism in order to gain funding from powerful
but racist white men for their cause. These reasons for racism in the Womens Rights movement are not excuses, they
are simply an explanation.
ZAI CHAKRANE
The Mother Of Us All, Is She Really The Mother of Us ALL?
In Gertrude Steins The Mother Of Us All, Susan B.
Anthony stands as a strong and important figure. Her fight
for womens right to vote is crucial. In Act 2 Scenes 2 and
3 there is discussion of not only womens rights but also
black rights. In these sections, the play highlights the issue
of black voter rights and the divide between women and
black men in this battle of who will get the right to vote.
The questions and the controversies circling around whether
black men were to be granted the right to vote is one that
as well shows through in this play.
Black rights and black theatre. What is the relation?
Much more then most would expect. Much of black theatre
began with black face and the degradation of black culture
in America. Originally, the only roles black artists got in the
theatre were not even played by them. White characters
would over exaggerate African American features and perform in black face and completely and absolutely shame the
black community. The start of the black community breaking
these stereotypes and showcasing what black folks actually
wanted to see and perform in started with the move from
realism to rituals. Slowly the black theatre community broke
out of Western cultural stereotypes and moved up to the
storytelling of their history and actual culture from their eyes
and not the eyes of others.
This started by basing works around the motherland,
Africa. Many black artists based productions around telling the stories of African culture instead of the history of
just the Western world. It was progressAfrican American
people bringing back their roots and finding who they truly
were before they were made to believe they were less then
human. After this progression had occurred, black theatre
moved towards the telling of their rituals instead of just the
stories of realism. Black theatre was able retell their history
from the Western world and dignify their culture. They re-
claimed what was once held against them in the war of stereotype and racism. Through these progressions in theatre,
the black community grew as well in many aspects. All while
the theatre world is progressing, black citizens are earning
their rights and their liberation back. It was no longer just
a dream they sang to us on stage; the black community
worked hard and made progress in all fields of their community.
LEEANN REED
DAVID MILLER
KESIA A. CAMERON
IAN KELLEY
MORGAN REICHERT
ROBERTINO DEL ROSARIO
ZAI CHAKRANE
who, having both
FULLFILLED & TRANSCENDED
their stations as WRITING MAJORS
in AMANDA DAVIDSONs Spring 2016 class
at the Pratt Institute,
hereby invite you to READ with CURIOSITY
through the pages of this PLAYBILL
and also to BROWSE FREELY
through the SOURCE MATERIALS and
scrupulously ANNOTATED BIBLIGIOGRAPHIES
compiled in the POP-UP LIBRARY,
located in the LOBBY
of this selfsame
MEMORIAL HALL