Kathleen Turner plays Gertrude Stein in Listen to Me written by Gertrude Stein in 1936, inspired by the circus spectacles Stein saw as a child.
Directed by David Kaplan, live horses and an ensemble of dressage riders and actors (including Brenda Currin as Alice B. Toklas and Lou Liberatore as Picasso) embody Stein’s words at the FITS Theatre Festival in Sibiu, Romania June 26 and 27, 2025.
For more information about Listen to Me @ FITS
In Stein’s text “Sweet William” is in love with “his Lillian,” but struggles to express himself, counting his syllables over and over. In Kaplan’s staging of Listen to Me, “Sweet William” is an avatar of William Shakespeare. Lillian is Sweet William’s muse who entices him to follow her. “What is a genius?” Stein asks repeatedly, aligning herself and Sweet William —or any genius— in the circuitous process of pursuing their vision within the form of a play.
Called forth by Stein’s words, the geniuses who attended Stein’s salons assemble: Picasso, Josephine Baker, Hemingway, Dora Maar, and Scott Fitzgerald. The geniuses each pursue the muse in their own way. In the horse ring, the salon guests are simultaneously characters out of Picasso’s paintings of horse acrobats, paintings that hung over the armchairs of Stein and Toklas in Paris.
“Suddenly there is a war,” Picasso declares. The horses surround the dumbstruck geniuses, galloping in rhythm to the words of Stein’s text. The war horses exit, the rattled geniuses depart chattering. Stein and Toklas are left to the heroism of domesticity (and creation) despite potential catastrophe.
Stein and Toklas were warned not to return to Europe, where in 1936 a conflict of opposed forces in Spain began to escalate into battles worldwide. Performing Stein’s 1936 text in 2025 carries the forces of surreal theater forward to our own ominous time. As the great Romanian playwright Ionesco wrote: “the real must be in a way dislocated, before it can be re-integrated.”
In March of 1936, Miss Stein wrote a letter to her good friend Thornton Wilder:
“I have just finished one play about Sweet William and his Lillian it is called Listen to Me, I was worried lest it have too much meaning, but Alice says not, says it’s nice…”
Directed by David Kaplan with equestrian choreography by Patricia Norcia, who rides as Lillian. Featuring Portuguese dressage master Rodrigo Matos.
Photo of Gertrude Stein’s salon at 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris, circa 1908. By 1936 the Picasso paintings of the boy with the horse and the girl balancing on a ball were no longer in Stein’s collection.
