SOURCE: Mellow, James R. “Foreword: The Word Plays of Gertrude Stein.” In Operas and Plays, pp. 7-9. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1987.

In the following essay, Mellow examines the writing style and structures of the plays in Operas and Plays.

The theater of Gertrude Stein is as radical today as it was seventy or more years ago when, in the course of her early experiments, Stein started writing her odd word plays. These theatrical exercises—which began, she tells us, with What Happened: A Play; a play in which nothing happens—soon developed into a dramaturgy stripped bare of the essentials: plot, character development, scenery, stage directions. Even the dramatic structure, if it could be called that, did not clearly distinguish between scenes and acts. What was left was the actor (not always identifiable) and the written word.

The operas and plays of this volume [Operas and Plays...