Gertrude Stein: Operas and Plays

Legacy and commemoration

Stein has been the subject of many artistic works.

In Bryant Park, in New York City, there is cast replica of sculptor Jo Davidson's bronze bust of Stein. The original, created in 1923, is now in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.[147]

Composers Florence Wickham and Marvin Schwartz used Stein's text for their operetta Look and Long.[148]

In 2005, playwright/actor Jade Esteban Estrada portrayed Stein in the solo musical ICONS: The Lesbian and Gay History of the World, Vol. 1 at Princeton University. In 2006, theatre director/actor Luiz Päetow created his solo, Plays, portraying Stein's 1934 homonymous lecture, and toured Brazil for several years.[149] Loving Repeating is a musical by Stephen Flaherty based on the writings of Gertrude Stein. Stein and Toklas are both characters in the eight-person show. Stein is a central character in Nick Bertozzi's 2007 graphic novel The Salon.

The posthumously published Journals of Ayn Rand contain several highly hostile references to Stein. From Rand's working notes for her novel The Fountainhead, it is clear that the character Lois Cook in that book was intended as a caricature of Stein.[150]

Stein (played by Bernard Cribbins) and Toklas (played by Wilfrid Brambell) were depicted in the Swedish 1978 absurdist fiction film Picassos äventyr (The Adventures of Picasso) by director Tage Danielsson, with Gösta Ekman as Picasso.[151]

Stein was portrayed in the 2011 Woody Allen film Midnight in Paris by Kathy Bates, and by Tracee Chimo in the 2018 season of the television series Genius which focuses on the life and career of Pablo Picasso.

Waiting for the Moon, a movie starring Linda Bassett that was released in 1987.[152] The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, a TV series starring Alice Dvoráková that was released in 1993.[153]

Stein is added to a list of great artists and notables in the popular Broadway musical Rent in the song "La Vie Boheme". She is also mentioned in the Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers 1935 film Top Hat and in the song "Roseability" by the Scottish rock group Idlewild.

Composer Ricky Ian Gordon and librettist Royce Vavrek's opera 27 about Stein and Toklas premiered at Opera Theatre of St. Louis in June 2014 with Stephanie Blythe as Stein.[154]

In 2014 Stein was one of the inaugural honorees in the Rainbow Honor Walk, a walk of fame in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood noting LGBTQ people who have "made significant contributions in their fields".[155][156][157]

Edward Einhorn wrote the play The Marriage of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein, a farce about their fantasy marriage that also told the story of their life. It premiered in May 2017 at HERE Arts Center in New York.[158]

The 2018 artwork Words Doing As They Want to Do by Eve Fowler involved recording trans and lesbian Californians reading Stein's 1922 work called "Miss Furr and Miss Skeene".[159]

The Gertrude Stein Society (GSS) at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, an organization for LGBTQ+ students at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, is named after her.[160]


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