Director-Margaret Van Sant
by Lee Roscoe
Margaret Van Sant’s play Portraiture, which will be performed during Women’s Week at the Art House, explores the hidden history and relationships between Mabel Dodge Luhan, Gertrude Stein, and Alice B. Toklas, women ahead of their times, controversial, and in their own ways seminal figures in the arts.
Van Sant, who has produced and/or directed at least 30 plays, is a force in Provincetown theater which she came to after gigs at Long Wharf Theatre, New Haven, CT; Virginia Stage Company, Norfolk, VA; at the prestigious Arena Stage, in DC; and the Berkshire Theater Festival, Stockbridge, MA.
Van Sant was inspired to write Portraiture when, at Yale’s Beinecke Library, she saw portraits of the three women side by side, and was astonished that Mabel Luhan, about whom she had been writing a one woman play, was in the middle of the other two, “primarily because Mabel and Gertrude were big friends—Mabel made Stein famous in America—Alice was very jealous. And then Gertrude and Mabel had a huge falling out,” explains Van Sant. “Mabel would love being in between them forever, and Alice and Gertrude would hate it, they would hate it. And I thought, ‘what if they could tell us how they feel?’ That’s the germ of the play.”
She says the portraits come alive, stepping out of their frames, which have been faithfully replicated on stage, to speak, dance, and to interact to “finish off their relationships from when they were alive, to talk about art, to talk about which woman had the greatest impact on art, to talk abut their past jealousies, relationships, lesbian affairs, and to talk about Provincetown and Taos.”
It is Sylvia Santos (Susanna Creel) who magically brings the women into life. Santos is Van Sant’s creation, the character who ties the play together; a writer and art critic who’s a docent at the Beinecke, having lost her prior university job because of the current administration, she wants to write a breakthrough book about the historical place of these female movers and shakers. Sylvia is a synesthete, meaning she can hear colors, and so she can hear the thoughts of the characters in the paintings. The rest of the cast includes Kimberly Lajoie as Mabel Dodge Luhan, Lynda Sturner as Alice B. Toklas, and Mary Chris Kenney as Gertrude Stein.
For those who may not be up on Stein’s relevance, Van Sant says that she and her brother from a wealthy American family went to Paris where they collected and championed some of most important modern art and writers such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Thornton Wilder. Stein may have loved tweaking people for the sake of her own ego, but her modernist writing was so ahead of her time, it still has repercussions for the avant garde.
Toklas was not only Stein’s lifetime lover and muse but her transcriber. “Gertrude would stay up late doing automatic writings; Alice would put her to bed, then transcribe her writings into a format which was legible and could be published,” Van Sant explains.
Mabel Dodge Luhan was a notorious free spirit in her time, a writer of memoir and a nature writer who Van Sant says influenced other nature writers. Notably, Luhan was also one of the first to bring Native American art to the fore of national consciousness, yet she was slammed for cultural appropriation. It seems unfair to Van Sant and she addresses this in the play—indeed, Gertrude defends Picasso’s use of African masks-– that it is not theft but inspiration.
Van Sant had Robin Joyce Miller, an African-American dramaturge vet the play for racial sensitivity, and Jim Dalglish was a dramaturg for the play’s structure itself; Van Sant credits him with making some changes which really helped shape the final version. It’s been a process of evolution over about six years—from readings and workshops in graduate school to this new production, which, produced by Helltown Players, was performed last spring at Cape Cod Museum of Art and Cotuit Center for the Arts.
There are several central themes in Portraiture. The portrait of Stein in question (painted by Francis Picabia) depicts her in a Mexican serape sitting in the mountains of the southwest. But “she never went to the southwest, did not have a fondness for Native Americans, so why was she in this painting? That’s the kernel of what Sylvia is trying to figure out,” Van Sant says.
Another theme? “The whole point of the play is to talk about women’s impact on art.” Van Sant says, we forget the importance of the salons women created to bring artists together in their homes, talk about art and bring artists forward; there were so many at that time: in Greenwich Village, New York, and L.A. Stein had her famed salon in Paris, and Luhan herself had hers at her art colony in Taos, New Mexico, where Georgia O’Keefe, Ansel Adams, D.H. Lawrence, and Willa Cather gathered. But Van Sant comments, she had a salon before that in 1916 in Provincetown, about which little is known.
“We don’t even know where Mabel’s house was. I wanted to resurrect these women so people can know more about them, especially Mabel.” And, she adds,“[Theater] has a way to speak to people emotionally; when people gather together it is a like a church… but better.”
Portraiture will be performed at Art House, 214 Commercial St., Provincetown, Wednesday, October 15 through Saturday, October 18, 7 p.m. and Sunday, October 19, 2 p.m. For tickets ($15 – $40) and information visit rainboweg.com.
