Starting off the PART LAST installment of our STEIN LAB, we interviewed Lead Artist Sarah Lurie, a New York-based lighting designer and theater artist. Her new piece Mrs. Misses Kisses will be going up at The Connelly Theater beginning Friday June 12th. Tickets are only $15 and available HERE.

TMT: Do you remember your first Stein encounter? How have your feelings / perceptions evolved today as you get ready to present Mrs. Misses Kisses?

SL: As a college student I designed the lights for an excerpt of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights. This excerpt was performed as part of a collection of female playwrights published between 1640-2010. While the other women presented relatively straightforward narrative plots, Stein’s heightened language and unique presentation on the page created as much ambience for me as it did storytelling. Stein’s refusal to adhere to the syntax of traditional playwriting is exciting–the page often leaves us without clues as to who is speaking and what text is spoken versus stage direction. Indeed, without the subtitle ‘play’, a reader could have difficulty differentiating her plays from her portraits.

TMT: How did you approach your particular Stein source material? How has that approach metamorphosed during the show’s development?

SL: As I was reading Stein and selecting specific source material, I kept on thinking of the Futurist poetic movement of Zaum. These writers created poems of nonsense syllables just to hear the flow of sounds together. While Stein’s words have clear weight and meaning, I think the sound of her words is equally important. I’ve also done a fair amount of traveling to foreign countries while this piece was in creation, which exposed me to the universal rhythms of language, which I tried to incorporate. Without understanding a language, I could decipher an argument, a seduction, a joke based on the cadence of the language. As I started to gather recordings, I began to direct people to speak the language in different tones to see what emerged from the text.

TMT: Your show has a large recorded audio component to it. What about Stein influenced the decision to use this method of theatrical presentation?

SL: I think what draws me most to Stein is her use of language. Just as Stein wrote a string of paragraphs and labelled it a play, I decided to take a piece with no live actors and label it a play. By focusing on the auditory component and playing with timing and rhythm, I hope to disrupt traditional expectations of theater and simultaneously allow the audience to immerse themselves in the sounds of Stein’s language.

TMT: If you were to take Gertrude Stein to attend one of your favorite contemporary theater pieces, how might she interpret it?

SL: I think it would be really fun to take Stein to Sleep No More. In part, this is because of the format of the show, in which the actors and audience members share a space and activate an entire building (instead of the traditional proscenium house). I also love that the show includes so much silence and visual cues, whereas Stein to me is so completely about language.

TMT: Do you have a favorite line from Stein at the moment?

SL: Of course it’s the line from which I derived the title of my piece: Who won one. Who won won. Mrs. Mrs. kisses, Mrs. kisses most. Mrs. misses kisses, misses kisses most. Who won you.

Sarah Lurie’s Mrs. Misses Kisses runs June 12th – 18th at The Connelly Theater at various times. Tickets are only $15 and available HERE.