**6. Coda**

Stein's work sits at a thorny, postsecular nexus between a disenchanted, bounded, modern universe and an enchanted, porous, mystical world. Her theatrical inheritors and interpreters have likewise inherited both of these sets of meanings, and when they channel Stein, they channel both the metaphysical mists and the skepticism from which her work sprung. This tension is often visible in their works. Postmodern theater-makers took up Stein's project, further fleshing out her theories about writing in the dimensional space of the stage. The influence of Stein on the works of the Living Theatre, Richard Foreman, the Wooster Group, and others has been traced more fully elsewhere, but here I will mention a few. To return to the web of associations that tie Stein to American metaphysical religion and its roots in liberal Protestantism, it seems more than coincidental that many of these later artists who have been deeply in dialogue with Stein's formal dimensions have also found themselves engaged with the combinative nature of American metaphysical spirituality.

Alisa Solomon observed that from its midcentury emergence, experimental performance in America engaged in dialogue with religion, both within the institutions that supported it and in the content of the work itself. Institutions such as "Theater Genesis in St. Mark's Church under rector Michael Allen; Judson Poets' Theatre under minister Al Carmines at the Judson Memorial Church; and the Theater at St. Clements under its vicar Sidney Lanier"—key figures in the Off-Off-Broadway movement—grew out of artistic and social programming produced though liberal Protestant congregations (Solomon 2011, p. 13). Bread and Puppet, the Living Theatre, and the Performance Group were among the most visible companies that staged their call for political and spiritual transformation through experimental dramaturgies.

Starting with the Beat generation of the mid-1950s, a mistrust of scientific rationality and institutional religion sparked spiritual revivals, an interest in Eastern traditions, and a fascination with eclectic forms of metaphysical religion. To engage with the religious concerns of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture, theater artists looked to prophets of their own like Antonin Artaud, whose *The Theatre and Its Double* was translated into English in 1958, and the experimental laboratory of Jerzy Grotowski. For other alternative dramaturgies, they also looked to Stein. Though her engagement with the sacred was far less overt than in the work of Artaud and Grotowski, Stein's secularization of metaphysical concepts paradoxically paved the way for both sincere ritualized theatrical events that aimed to incite spiritual and political revolution (as in The Living Theatre and the Performance Group) as well as far more skeptical works that resist spiritual communion (as in the Wooster Group or Richard Foreman).

The Living Theatre, like many American experimental artists, cut their teeth on Gertrude Stein. In 1951, five years after their founding, they staged Stein's opera libretto *Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights* (1938) in a program of poetic dramas rarely produced in America at the time. Their most famous work, *Paradise Now* (1968), though not particularly Steinian, was structured according to a host of metaphysical references, including the ten *sephirot*, or emanations, of Kabbalah as well as the I-Ching and the chakra system. Part happening, part rite, the company lead the audience through a series of "rituals, visions, and actions" to usher in a new world through non-violent revolution (Walker 2019). As Christopher Innes wrote of the Living Theatre: "They repeatedly termed their political aim "prophesying", described their theatre as "performing a ceremony" and its intended effect as "absolute communion", referred to the actor as "a priest" or "shaman", and pointed out their "concern with primitive and mystic rituals"" (Innes 1981, p. 187). This combinative spirituality, bringing together medieval Jewish mysticism, a Chinese divinatory system, and the Hindu-Buddhist centers of spiritual energy in the body directly reflects the language of American metaphysical religion.

Elinor Fuchs argues for a connection between Stein's landscape dramaturgy and the works of various postmodern theater-makers whose pieces feature "non-linear spatial structures, and are concerned not with individual character or a temporal progression but with a total state or condition" and "also draw important moments of imagery from natural landscape" (Fuchs 1995). Fuchs pivots away from connections to natural landscapes when discussing the works of Richard Foreman and Liz LeCompte, arguing instead for a concept of "mindscapes", particularly in the case of Foreman..

Richard Foreman has long decked his hermetic mindscapes with occult symbols, Hebrew letters he does not read, and Jewish prayer paraphernalia. If, as Albanese suggests, American metaphysical religion has served to democratize the occult, Foreman's project may be said to re-consign such secrets to the shadows. Foreman presents occult signs that point back to nothing, divulging secrets in languages we no longer speak, offering esoteric mysteries into which no one can be initiated. Foreman, who directly acknowledges his debt to Stein, also described himself as a "closet religious writer" (Foreman 1992, p. 5).

The Wooster Group's engagement with American metaphysical religion is subtler, but many of their productions use technology to channel the voices of the dead. In *Rumstick Road* (1977), one of their earliest works, audio recordings of Spalding Gray's deceased family members featured prominently in the technological warp and weft of this experimental memory play, which also borrowed text from Mary Baker Eddy's writings on Christian Science. Ron Vawter's now-famous rendering of Vershinin's final speech in *Fish Story* (1994), recorded and glowing through screens present on stage, allowed the dying Vawter to remain in this world as he stepped one foot into the next. In 2007's *Hamlet*, Richard Burton's staging of Shakespeare's play came alive in the theater again, embodied and voiced by company members performing in front of a recording of Burton's 1965 production. Theater itself, usually consigned to that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns, was here released from its videotaped purgatory to speak again through a willing company of mediums. In *Early Shaker Spirituals* (2014)*,* a "record album interpretation", the Group channeled Shaker women who were believed to have received messages from the spirit world and captured them in song. It also bears noting, particularly with regard to *Early Shaker Spirituals*, that in a rediscovered chapter of Thomas Edison's diary—recovered in 2015—Edison discussed his desire to create a phone to the afterlife. In the post-WWI Spiritualist revival, Edison sought to capture the voices of the departed through technology and detailed his scientific theory explaining how these voices might be recorded. While the Wooster Group's technological obsessions may spring more recently from experiments with postmodern intermediality, the roots of these obsessions stretch far further back into the shadowy spaces of American religious longing.

While this article has primarily focused on the religious reverberations in Stein's work, a fuller picture of the metaphysical avant-garde would bring the spiritual resonances in Stein together with a greater exploration of the ritual performances of midcentury. It might ask why the skepticism in Stein gives way to the sincerity of communal ritual in groups like the Living Theatre and the Performance Group only to be replaced by skepticism again in Foreman and the Wooster Group. It might ask how Stein's dramaturgy and the current occult revival come together onstage today. It might ask why Reverend Al Carmines, Off-Off-Broadway pioneer, the liberal Protestant minister at Judson Memorial Church, founder of Judson Poets' Theater, and composer of five musicals about Gertrude Stein, articulated his own conflation of God and art this way: "If you want to know how to live, go to church. If you want to know how your life is in its deepest roots, go to the theater" (Martin 2005).

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

#### **References**

Albanese, Catherine L. 2007. *A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion*. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 1–21.

Bay-Cheng, Sarah. 2004. *Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein's Avant-Garde Theater*. New York: Routledge, p. 119.


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