Looking for the One Who Looks Like Some One: The Unmarked Subject(s) in Gertrude Stein's A Play Called Not and Now

Abstract

This essay focuses on Gertrude Stein's 1936 work A Play Called Not and Now, often regarded as Stein's most virulent attack on the theatre and the theatre's corruption of selves into simulacra, “entity” into “identity.” But if the play articulates Stein's discomfort with how her rising literary fame complicated her expressions of entity, it also offers a solution to this discomfort within the very theatrical conventions it appears to critique. Employing the methodology of performance studies, which regards performance as a unique medium that, in the words of Peggy Phelan, “becomes itself through disappearance,” this essay locates the centre of the play in its verbs rather than in its nouns and in the authorial presence it refuses to describe rather than in the celebrities it names. The essay begins with a detailed analysis of Stein's repetition of the verb “to look” throughout the play in order to re-examine the often debated question of what Stein meant when she called a work a play.