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, with equestrian choreography by Patricia Norcia, 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.
Premiere at the 2025 FITS Theatre Festival in Sibiu, Romania.
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.”
From Act I “All that was inside him inside dear Sweet William was shown not to be in him but to be held up so anyone looking could see them”
In the photo: Kathleen Turner as Stein, Brenda Currin as Toklas, Sam Ridley as Sweet William, Patricia Norcia as Lillian. In performance in Sibiu. Photo credit: Ovidiu Matiu.
From Act III: “Sweet William has a fountain. He had his genius and now he has a fountain”
In the photo: Kathleen Turner as Stein, Dana Marie Ingraham as Josephine Baker in rehearsal in Clinton, Connecticut. Photo credit : Eyva Fotografi.
