SOURCE: Bowers, Jane. “The Writer in the Theater: Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts.” In Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein, edited by Michael J. Hoffman, pp. 210-25. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1986.

In the following essay, Bowers demonstrates how Stein made the writing process a part of the performance of Four Saints in Three Acts.

I

Gertrude Stein approached drama as she did every genre: She examined the genre's conventions, found them inadequate, and proceeded to redefine the genre as she worked within it. By the time she began writing Four Saints in Three Acts in 1927, Stein had grappled with the redefinition of drama in over sixty plays.¹

Reading these plays, one can see that Stein rejected the conventional definition of drama as articulated later on, for example, by Eric Bentley. According to Bentley:

The drama everyone agrees presents character in action. Human actions become “an action...