**1. Metaphysical Religion**

In the ever-unfolding story of religiously-inflected theater created for secular American stages, scholarly narratives may neglect to focus on the presence of metaphysical religion. Scholars and

<sup>2</sup> In *Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis,* Lisa Ruddick argues that Stein's radical innovations encode her process of self-definition against James and the entire nineteenth century, which he represented. In *Poetry and Pragmatism*, an exploration of the thematic and syntactic links between Emerson and a handful of modern American writers—including Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and Stein—Richard Poirier, calls William James the "point of transmission" linking Emerson to the rest, and proposes that all, in spite of their "democratic impulse", share "a recognition that language, if it is to represent the flow of individual experience, ceases to be a instrument of clarification or clarity and, instead, becomes the instrument of a saving uncertainty and vagueness". Poirier casts Emerson as a kind of proto-postmodern, citing Emerson's recognition that "every text is a reconstruction of some previous texts" and that language both "creates structures we can believe in" while simultaneously creating "gaps in those structures, gaps in what it only pretends to have settled". This skepticism particularly manifests in "matters of belief". Poirier traces this skepticism through Emerson, James, and Stein, and shows how Emerson's progeny continually revised and reformed his ideas, each through his or her own unique genius.

critics often limit discussions of religion on secular stages to works that appear overtly in dialogue with a religious context: i.e., *Jesus Christ Superstar*, to offer an example from some of the decades mentioned here, or Lucas Hnath's *The Christians* and Joshua Harmon's *Bad Jews*, as examples from our more recent moment. Additionally, scholarship tends to focus on works in dialogue with various Christian traditions as well as on Judaism to a lesser degree. But as Catherine Albanese has argued, metaphysical religion represents a significant vein of spiritual practice within the story of American religion. A notable exception in this body of scholarship is Edmund Lingan's *The Occult Revival and Its Theatrical Impulses* (2014), which explores drama and performance in dialogue with a variety of traditions that fall under the larger banner of the term "metaphysical". Lingan's American examples, however, were primarily performed within ritual contexts and utopian spiritual communities rather than for heterogeneous audiences on secular stages. By unearthing metaphysical resonances in Stein's work and the work of her later admirers, metaphysical religion finds a more central place in the larger story of religion on professional stages.

Defining metaphysical religion requires its own complicated web of associations. In her 2001 book *The Republic of Mind and Spirit*, Catherine Albanese offered a complimentary narrative to the evangelical and denominational stories of American religion by tracing a third strand—a "combinative" religious practice she called "metaphysical" (Albanese 2007, p. 21). In 2005, Leigh Eric Schmidt argued in *Restless Souls* that those who today identify as "spiritual but not religious" come from a documentable tradition dating to the nineteenth century's shift towards religious liberalism—a shift that began ostensibly with the Transcendentalists. Both show how this non-creedal spirituality espoused religious ecumenism, inclusivity, and individual mystical access to the divine. Whether labeled "mysticism," "metaphysical religion," or "spirituality," this American religious tradition is "excitedly eclectic, mystically yearning, perennially cosmopolitan" and offers a liberal, progressive, left-leaning spiritual counterweight to orthodox religions and the Christian Right (Schmidt 2005, p. 6).

While Schmidt focused on the shift towards liberalism in the nineteenth century, Albanese's story of metaphysical religion in America began in the Hermetic and vernacular magical traditions of Europe and traced its reformulation in the New World after contact with African and Indigenous traditions. She followed the word "metaphysics" from a nineteenth-century "catholicity of mind and spirit signified, especially, by an openness to Asia and an embrace of South and East Asian religious ideas and practices" through the twentieth-century shift towards "a self-styled name for Americans who understood themselves as seekers on a 'spiritual' path" (Albanese 2007, p. 12). Schmidt focused on the trajectory of the American religious "seeker" or "mystic," from the Transcendentalists along the open road of Whitman through what is often referred to today as "self-care"—cultivating a calm, centered inner life within the stresses of the workaday world. Beginning with Emersonian individualism and Thoreauvian solitude, Schmidt forged a path through the search for a universal mystical religion and the burgeoning vogue for meditation.

To make Stein's metaphysical resonances legible requires a return to Albanese's definition of metaphysical religion, which, above all, is concerned with "mind and its powers". Albanese explains, "Mind, in short, is about consciousness and all that derives from and returns to it—with emphasis ever on the mental awareness by which humans interact with their environments." Mind covers a range of experiences and expressions: "poetry and intuition"; so-called "psychic" activities like "clairvoyance and telepathy"; the experience of "altered states of attention such as trance and meditation"; mind even "translates to action and material transformation". The metaphysics of mind forms a nexus between interiority and the physical world that ground metaphysical religion. In the centuries of history Albanese traverses, this concept of mind remains continually at the center, in practices as varied as mental healing, meditation, and channeling (ibid, p. 13).

Albanese also points to the ways in which American metaphysical religion recapitulates the "ancient cosmological theory of correspondences between worlds" and posits an equivalence between the macrocosmic "world of divinity, Nature, or the metaphysically favored eternal or collective Mind" and the microcosmic "human (and sometimes natural) world and/or mind". Macrocosm and microcosm "could be described as made of the same stuff", like each other "in all things except scale" (13–14). Albanese's reconstruction of the long lineage of these correspondences shows how each proffered a unique but analogous set of terminology to describe this macro/microcosmic relationship, from Transcendentalism to Christian Science to New Age philosophy.

The relationship between the macrocosm and microcosm, meditation, the observance of nature, and the workings of the mind all figured heavily into metaphysical discourses in which William James participated as well as in the general spiritual tenor of late-nineteenth century America into which Stein was born and educated. As Ulla Dydo pointed out, more knowledge of Cambridge in the 1890s would help illuminate the intellectual atmosphere of Stein's formative years and offer new ways of thinking about her work (Dydo 2003).
