What would pioneering lesbian power couple Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas have to say about Donald Trump’s take on revisionist history? How might Mabel Dodge Luhan — a provocative cultural visionary and contemporary of Stein and Toklas — respond to today’s debates around intersectionality and critical race theory?
And what might these three powerful cultural icons say if they suspected their legacies had been distorted by the biases and assumptions of the historians trying to preserve them?
In Margaret Van Sant’s witty and wonderfully imagined new play “Portraiture,” they do, in fact, have plenty to say.
Set in the Rare Reading Room of Yale’s Beinecke Library, the play opens with Stein, Toklas and Luhan as painted portraits hanging on the gallery wall. But after a touch of theatrical magic, these formidable women step out of their frames — and into the present — to confront, challenge, and ultimately correct the stories history has told about them.
In addition to Stein and Toklas, the third portrait belongs to the infamous American patron of the arts, Mabel Dodge Luhan — played in a saucy, bravura performance by Anna Botsford. A contemporary of Stein and Toklas, Luhan was a cofounder of the original Provincetown Players (circa Eugene O’Neill) and a firebrand in her own right. Stein, portrayed with sharp-tongued perfection by Kathleen Larson Day, and Toklas, rendered with heart-melting humor by Karen McPherson, share more than just a modernist legacy with Luhan — they also share more than a few unsettled scores.
Much of the historical record they’ve simply got to correct revolves around who’s who in the art world, personal scandals, old grudges, and why Stein, whose sartorial tastes were more Saville Row butch than Indigenous, appears in her portrait draped in nothing but a Southwestern sarape. All these tantalizing tidbits allude to the broader and extremely timely questions of what it means to look at history (and the world) through fresh eyes.
Rounding out the tight ensemble cast is a struggling art historian who’s taken on a side gig as a museum docent only to witness this whole exchange of revisionist art history. Tasked with leading a routine gallery tour, she finds herself caught between the past and present as these resurrected women take over the narrative — and the gallery itself. As art historian Sylvia Santos, Kristen Stewart brilliantly referees the heated passions and personal revelations of the resurrected trio.
After the dust settles, audiences will never look at art, history, or even their own personal relationships in quite the same way again.
The play’s set is simple and elegantly picture-perfect. The show opens like a tableau vivant with the three figures frozen in their frames, constructed in beautiful detail by John Killwey, co-owner of media production company Shooting Star Creativeworks.
Playwright Van Sant, who also directs this dialog-rich tour de force, says she has worked on the script for more than 15 years, tweaking and sharpening it. Her interest in Dodge Luhan led her to the Yale library where she was stunned to find Dodge Luhan’s portrait displayed between longtime lovers Stein and Toklas.
“The first time I saw their portraits hung together, I knew immediately that Gertrude and Alice would have hated it. That moment was the birth of this play,” says Van Sant. And the rest is history.
To produce the play, Van Sant worked closely with fellow playwright and dramaturge Jim Dalglish, who is also the founder and producing artistic director for the play’s production company Helltown Players (where Van Sant also serves on the board). Helltown Players is a collaborative of dramatists, producers, directors, actors, designers, technicians, and theater enthusiasts whose mission is to produce plays written by playwrights with meaningful connections to Cape Cod.
As Dalglish notes in his curtain speech, “Portraiture” is the 15th new play written by a Cape Cod playwright that Helltown Players has produced since the organization’s founding two years ago.
You can catch Helltown Players’ production of “Portraiture” at Cotuit Center for the Arts’ Sigel Black Box Theater (4404 Falmouth Rd, Cotuit, MA) at 7:30 p.m. Thursday to Saturday, May 22–24 & 29–31, and at 2 p.m. Sunday, June 1.
The play also opened to rave reviews from critics and the audience at the Cape Cod Museum of Art earlier this month.
“Portraiture” gives contemporary audiences a thoroughly entertaining opportunity to see how the lives of three brilliant, trailblazing women not only changed the course of history, but continue to inform and impact contemporary culture. Exactly what our troubled world needs right now.
For tickets & more: helltownplayers.org
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