“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, is a rose” is a familiar example of Gertrude Stein’s idiosyncratic way with words. So is “Pigeons on the grass alas.” But how about this description of a petticoat: “A light white, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm”? Or this definition of a sound: “Elephant beaten with candy and little pops and chews all bolts and reckless reckless rats, this is this”? Or this brief comment on gracious eating: “Dining is west”?
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Now Tender Buttons itself has been reconceived as a theatrical text: Still Life With Stein, created and performed by New York-based actor and producer Laura Sheppard. First unveiled as a work in progress in 1986 in the Boston-Cambridge area, where Sheppard was then living, the one-act, one-woman piece has been presented at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Italy’s Ente Festivale Chieri, and elsewhere in Europe, as well as in New York and around the east coast; its Chicago premiere opens this week under the auspices of Nicole Dreiske’s International Performance Studio.
The title of Sheppard’s performance echoes Stein’s characterization of Tender Buttons as a collection of verbal still lifes, literary equivalents of the pictures being made by the cubist artists she admired, such as Picasso and Braque. Just as a painter might create on canvas his highly personal visual interpretation of an orange or a room, in her book of prose poems (some quite short) Stein sought to evoke or respond to commonplace objects and notions in a decidedly uncommon way. “She was breaking up sentence structure and grammar the way painters were breaking up images into many different fragments,” explains Sheppard. “She was bringing in different perspectives, showing the inside and the outside, and she was exploring the subconscious realm. It wasn’t stream of consciousness, like James Joyce; she felt she was putting down on paper a distillation of thoughts.”
Sheppard believes her show will stimulate audiences to consider their own responses to the material. “Which is what Stein was trying to do,” she says, by inviting multiple, subjective interpretations to her abstract language. The very title Tender Buttons has been explained as a reference to a woman perusing her button collection (and certainly buttons removed from their usual positions on clothing are comparable to words ripped from their conventional contexts, as they were by Stein), to peyote-induced hallucinations, and to sex. “I did talk to Virgil Thomson once when he was in Boston,” Sheppard says, “and I asked him what it meant. All he said was, “Oh, it was considered very risque, my dear.”‘
