SOURCE: Garvin, Harry R. “Sound and Sense in Four Saints in Three Acts.” The Bucknell Review 5, no. 1 (1954): 1-11.

In the following essay, Garvin analyzes the dramatic action of Four Saints in Three Acts in terms of Stein's so-called “portrait” style and the play's relative significance among the playwright's other works.

The delight of Broadway audiences with the two productions of Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts was enthusiastic, genuine, but superficial. The spectators were blithely free of any prior notions about the plot and the meanings of the opera. The program notes for the second production, by not giving even enticing clues, helped the spectators enjoy their innocence boldly. Though surely only about one in five thousand spectators in either 1934 or 1952 had read Miss Stein's libretto through, it was apparently assumed that only Philistines would actually need any explanation of—among other mysteries—the connection between the...