Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (1938) is a libretto for an opera by the American modernist playwright and poet Gertrude Stein. The text has become a rite of passage for avant-garde theatre artists from the United States: La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, Judson Poets' Group, The Living Theatre, Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson, and The Wooster Group have all produced the piece.

Background

Stein wrote the piece during what critics often refer to as the final or narrative period of her playwriting career. From 1932 onwards, she had begun to rediscover and reintegrate stories into her dramatic writing, an element hitherto she had worked to exclude. In a letter to Carl Van Vechten, Stein identified her work on this piece as a breakthrough: "I have been struggling with this problem of dramatic narrative and in Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights I think I got it." Despite her newfound use for narrative, Stein did not, as scholar Betsy Alayne Ryan states, "leap foolishly into ordinary comprehensibility." Lord Berners had adapted Stein's play ''They must. Be wedded. To their wife. (1931) into his choral ballet A Wedding Bouquet'' (1937), and he commissioned a new text from her, intending to compose the music himself. She wrote Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights for Berners in 1938, but he was unable to write the score. In 1949 Virgil Thomson considered writing the music, but he was dissuaded by Alice B. Toklas, then Stein's literary executor.

Structure

The structure of action in Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights does not resemble that which is traditionally thought to constitute a play. The progressive development of a coherent plot that unfolds through the interaction between a configuration of figures is just discernible. These include Faustus’ relationship to Mephisto, Faustus and Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel, and the pairings of minor characters (Boy and Dog, Boy and Girl, Dog Mephisto and Viper, Country Woman Viper and MIHA, the Man from Overseas and Faustus, he and MIHA). The text does not allow for a stable diagramming or coherent identities. Like the speech-headings in Elizabethan and Jacobean texts, Stein describes her characters in a number of different ways, suggesting some degree of multiplicity in her conception of dramatic character (most explicitly present in the multiple characterization of "Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel"). The play adopts a number of textual strategies that presuppose a relationship to performance, though it is performance conceived in a distinctly modernist way: as spatial meaning (like Artaud's mise en scène or Brecht's Gestus), self-referential (as Beckett's work increasingly became or as in Brechtian quotation), and unconstrained by any adherence to the conventions associated with traditional dramatic literature (from which each of these practitioners have displayed varying degrees of independence). Like Beckett, Stein is interested in an aesthetic of surfaces - of formal elements interacting in space - which do not serve the traditional purpose of the imitation of action. The aesthetic assumptions about performance embodied in Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights and the ambiguity in its textual composition produce elements unanchored from a referential process towards any reality other than its own occasion; it suggests a fully self-referential performance.

Plot

The piece opens with Faustus (his precise name shifts and alters throughout the piece) looking out from the doorway to his study, which streams with intense white light from beyond, when Mephisto appears: Despite this opening, Stein proceeds to marginalize the Faustian struggle between good and evil within the breast of Man, which is traditionally played out through the relation between Faustus and Mephistopheles, in favour of a conflict (if the play can be said to have a dramatic conflict in the traditional sense of the word) between Faustus and "Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel." In Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, Stein - a highly-experimental modernist writer - dramatizes an archetypal modernist myth (of Man's uneasy relationship with his machines) from the competing - and gendered - perspective(s) of the multiple woman.

Staged productions