The PART LAST evenings of our STEIN LAB include a new piece by Lead Artist Patrick Scheid (co-founder of theater collective Homunculus, Inc. and company member of Theater Reconstruction Ensemble), bringing his performance-based theatrical sensibilities to The Connelly Theater. His new work Someday Americans opens on Friday June 12th. Tickets are only $15 and available HERE.

TMT: Do you remember your first Stein encounter? How have your feelings / perceptions evolved to today, as you get ready to present Someday Americans?

PS: I cannot remember my first Stein experience, but I am sure that it was just in relation to some other artist. Reading her while doing something with Dadaists or Hemingway, or one of the dozens of other movers who have a branch leading back to her. This is the first time I’ve grappled with her head-on. Sometimes it feels like we’re dancing and others I feel like we’re arm wrestling. She’s usually leading either way. I cannot say that after all this I am in love with her, but I have a deep respect for her and what she was able to do. She seems ahead of her time and still somewhat ahead of ours.

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

PS: I was a little unsure how to begin. I knew I needed to focus on the haptic quality of Stein’s writing and I knew I wanted to better understand her ideas of a “theatrical landscape”. Landscape seemed to pair well with her numerous writings on America – a country she curiously chose to live apart from but one of which she still wrote fondly. “Americans” from her collection Geography and Plays was a tantalizing playground to explore these things. We know from her lecture Plays that she frequently felt emotionally out of step with her contemporary theatre experiences. Embracing this, we worked at it a little like jazz, deliberately syncopating words and actions, and parsing through what would be counter to its pairs and what would be complimentary. Since theatre is a medium of breath and flesh, we played hard to see which images from the text we would make manifest on the stage and which we would let live in words alone only to be birthed in the audience’s imagination. I came to my team with a skeleton for this piece and with an astoundingly supple tenacity they fashioned with me its tissue. I’m very proud of what we’re making. Being in a room with people I love and trust reminded me to have fun. Once that happened things began to really crackle, leading us down the right path for something honest and madcap.

TMT: How did the idea of including a large musical component in your piece enter into your creative process?

PS: I think music and performing Stein go hand in hand. Of course, it also comes with the historical territory of performing Stein. Thinking of Four Saints, The Mother of Us All, etc. Her writing simply lends itself to lyrics. When I had the incredible opportunity to work with Talking Band’s Ellen Maddow, (she has composed all our music and is performing in the work! She’s amazing.), I knew it had to be one of the main elements of Someday Americans. Ellen’s composition is astounding and a truly worthy pair to Stein’s lyrics. I’m also very lucky to have a musically gifted ensemble who can jump effortlessly from playing harmonicas to gobbling tomatoes to soft-shoeing to galloping away on their trusty steeds. Ellen and I have been talking since the beginning to figure out how sound can best converse with Stein’s seeming nonsense. The result is a piece that rejoices in its Modernist excess. It is rife with energy, music, movement, food, and more!

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

PS: That would be interesting. From what I’ve read, she didn’t enjoy theatre all that much so she would probably prefer if we did something else. But given the opportunity for an evening with Gertrude, I’d probably take her to see Clare Barron’s heartbreaking You Got Older. We wouldn’t be able to help laughing and crying together in spite of ourselves. Or maybe Tugboat Collective’s Poor Sailor for another devastating / arresting experience that proves you can still see new things. Or maybe I’d take her to William Burke’s Comfort Dogs. She’d probably love that. Music, beautiful language, and live dogs. She was so in love with her own dog Basket that she would include her in all sorts of writings. We would howl the night away.

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

PS: No, too many. Well, no, yes. I mean. This one line has continued to circulate in my brain throughout all this, from her Geographical History of America: Think not the way the land looks but the way it lies that is now connected with the human mind.

Patrick Scheid’s Someday Americans runs June 12th – 19th at The Connelly Theater at various times. Tickets are only $15 and available HERE.