Radio Free Stein: Gertrude Stein’s Parlor Plays

Returns us to Gertrude Stein’s theater by way of the modernist medium of radio

What happens when we listen to Gertrude Stein’s plays as radio and music theater? This book explores the sound of Stein’s theater and proposes that radio, when approached both historically and phenomenologically, offers technical solutions to her texts’ unique challenges. Adam J. Frank documents the collaborative project of staging Stein’s early plays and offers new critical interpretations of these lesser-known works. Radio Free Stein grapples with her innovative theater poetics from a variety of disciplinary perspectives: sound and media studies, affect and object relations theory, linguistic performativity, theater scholarship, and music composition.

ADAM J. FRANK is a professor of English at the University of British Columbia. His books include Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol and, coauthored with Elizabeth Wilson, A Silvan Tomkins Handbook. He is the creator and producer of the Radio Free Stein critical sound project, available at radiofreestein.com.