Unsettling Gertrude Stein: On the Citability of Baroque Gesture in Four Saints in Three Acts JOSEPH CERMATORI ABSTRACT: This article focuses on Gertrude Stein’s 1927 opera Four Saints in Three Acts, which takes a pair of baroque saints for its pro- tagonists and which debuted in a 1934 production replete with delib- erate citations of baroque stage design, gesture, and visual art – details that have gone almost entirely unacknowledged in the past several dec- ades’ scholarship on Stein. It recovers these forgotten production details by juxtaposing a reading of Stein’s text and performance theories with Walter Benjamin’s vision of baroque theatre as articulated in The Origin of German Trauerspiel. Interpreting Stein’s methods within the frame of baroque theatrical allegory, it suggests Stein’s situation within a larger tradition of baroque modernism. It argues that Stein found, within the concept of the baroque, a productive means of challen- ging norms of representation across a wide array of registers – linguistic, aesthetic, sexual, racial, and historiographic. KEYWORDS: Gertrude Stein, Walter Benjamin, baroque theatre, gesture, allegory, citationality, Four Saints in Three Acts Opening on Broadway to great acclaim after its brief debut at a regional art museum in Hartford, Connecticut, Four Saints in Three Acts (written 1927, premiered 1934) was Gertrude Stein’s first and only dramatic text to receive a major production during her lifetime. A foundational work of avant-garde theatre and opera in the United States, its premiere occurred amid the earliest art-historical re-evaluations of seventeenth-century Italian visual art by Amer- ican curators and collectors. The present article argues that this contempora- neous interest in the historical baroque period, far from being merely fortuitous or coincidental, actively shaped the conception, performance, and reception of Four Saints in Three Acts. With its counter-reformation-era pro- tagonists, Teresa of Ávila and Ignatius of Loyola, deployed as allegories for the modern-day artist’s life, Four Saints demonstrably undertakes a direct dia- logue with the conventions of baroque theatrical representation. This © University of Toronto doi: 10.3138/md.0747 http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.0747 - Joseph Cermatori <joseph.cermatori@gmail.com> - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 8:31:02 AM - IP Address:69.22.245.46