**Dana Tanner-Kennedy**

Department of Drama, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G 2R3, Canada; dana.tanner.kennedy@gmail.com

Received: 16 September 2019; Accepted: 12 March 2020; Published: 25 March 2020

**Abstract:** When American metaphysical religion appears onstage, it most often manifests in the subject matter and dramaturgies of experimental theater. In the artistic ferment of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture, theater-makers looked both to alternative dramaturgies and alternative religions to create radical works of political, social, and spiritual transformation. While the ritual experiments of European avant-garde artists like Artaud and Grotowski informed their work, American theater-makers also found inspiration in the dramas of Gertrude Stein, and many of these companies (the Living Theatre and the Wooster Group, most notably) either staged her work or claimed a direct influence (like Richard Foreman). Stein herself, though not a practitioner of metaphysical religion, spent formative years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Radcliffe under the tutelage of William James. Cambridge, at the turn of the twentieth century, was a hotbed of spiritualism, theosophy, alternative healing modalities, and James, in addition to running the psychology lab in which Stein studied, ran a multitude of investigations on extrasensory and paranormal phenomena. This article traces a web of associations connecting Ralph Waldo Emerson, Transcendentalism, and liberal Protestantism to Gertrude Stein and landscape dramaturgy to the midcentury avant-garde, the countercultural religious seeking of the 1960s and 1970s, and the Off-Off-Broadway movement.

**Keywords:** American avant-garde theater; Gertrude Stein; metaphysical religion

"Is life worth living? Yes, a thousand times yes when the world still holds such spirits as Prof. James", wrote a 21-year-old Gertrude Stein in ardent acclamation of her mentor, the eminent American psychologist and philosopher William James (Ruddick 1990) 1 . Stein's exuberant tribute seems to have been a response to the eponymous question James posed in one of his most famous essays, his 1895 lecture "Is Life Worth Living?", which dwelled not on the psychological concepts that Stein, a student at Radcliffe, studied in his classrooms and laboratories (the influence of which on her experimental prose style has been well-documented by critics and scholars). Rather, it presented thoughts on James's other chief field of experimentation and study: religion. The lecture described a relationship between the spiritual and natural worlds, defining religion as belief "that the so-called order of nature that constitutes this world's experience is only one portion of the total Universe, and that there stretches beyond this visible world an unseen world" which gives meaning to mundane reality (James 1895, p. 15). James argued for the power of "maybe" and the necessity of religious possibility, for a leap over the abyss towards which meaninglessness tempts in favor of an assent to the sacred, a yes to belief, a heroic burst of faith in the unseen order.

Whatever captivated Stein in James's talk was not unusual in his writing. Before composing his foundational text on religion, *The Varieties of Religious Experience* (1902), James rehearsed many of his ideas in the lecture hall and the lab. In doing so, he inevitably exposed his students to the religious ideas that influenced his own, chief among them the works of the minister, poet, and philosopher

<sup>1</sup> Quoted in Lisa Ruddick's *Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis*.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, a key architect of Transcendentalism, a uniquely American philosophy that influenced many of the metaphysical religions to which James devoted years of research. Within these later generations of spiritual practices could be found the DNA of Emerson's gospel of radical individualism, esoteric correspondences, continual revelation, personal spiritual discovery, Romantic nature, salutary solitude, and language's creative force.

While Stein eventually moved away from the direct influence of James, she remained steeped in his language and ideas, and traces of his religious experiments, as well as of Emerson, continued to arise in her work<sup>2</sup> . Stripping this language of its metaphysical overtones in favor of a deliberate vagueness, Stein could allude to these former meanings without directly referring to them (Poirier 1992). The result is that Gertrude Stein, despite her avowed secularism, is the foremost playwright of metaphysical America. And though Ulla Dydo, Marc Robinson, Joseph Cermatori, and Rebecca Kastleman, among others, have observed Stein's fascination with Catholicism and saints, less attention has been paid to metaphysical religion as a dimension of Stein's work or its ripple effect through the American avant-garde.

Stein's preoccupation with the workings of the mind, her embrace—knowingly or not—of a theory of correspondences to describe her personal metaphysics, and her attention to attention itself, to as Kate Davy put it, the "evolution of consciousness," locate her squarely within the primary obsessions of American metaphysical religion (Davy 1978, p. 124). Stein's use of the word "meditation" to describe her writing process reflects the larger late-nineteenth century cultural fascination with contemplative practice and "mental hygiene." Her turn to landscapes and nature stems in part from the influence of Transcendentalist thinkers. And her elevation of the artistic masterpiece as humanity's highest goal and achievement represents Stein's revision of Emersonian ideals. Metaphysical resonances persist in Stein's theories, in her plays, and in her dramaturgy, even when her work is later borrowed and remade by artists of the burgeoning American avant-garde of the 1960s and 70s.

What follows here are the seeds of an intellectual genealogy of the American avant-garde with particular attention paid to Stein and the shifting religious landscapes of metaphysical religion. As Sarah Bay-Cheng suggested: "the history of the avant-garde is perhaps best evaluated as an intricate web of overlapping and conflated influences, Stein being only one of them" (Bay-Cheng 2004, p. 119). Presented here are some of the primary strands of that web, or to offer another metaphor, a constellation of ideas that suggest a larger picture rather than propose a string of direct causal relationships. Within this constellation, Stein proves to be not only a major influence on the generations of American avant-garde that follow her, but she also provides a link to an earlier generation of metaphysical thought in America. By tracing Gertrude Stein's relationship to metaphysical religion, we can also begin to trace how theatrical alternatives to a dominant strain of realistic drama have grown up side by side with spiritual alternatives to the dominant faiths of evangelical and denominational religion. Stein's language echoes metaphysical discourse by retaining fragments of something beyond the material, hovering between belief and unbelief, haunted, teasing, suggesting.
