The Mademoiselles

Drama: 1 M, 4 W

You are a very different lady from yesterday. You have not the smiling countenance of yesterday. You were a golden brown presence, burned by the Tuscan sun and with a golden glint in your warm brown hair. You wore a large coral brooch and when you talked—very little—or laughed—a good deal—I thought your voice came from your brooch. It was unlike anyone else’s. Now you are like a vengeful goddess and I am afraid. I do not know what will happen now.

A graduate student at the Sorbonne reads an elderly Alice Toklas her love letters from Gertrude Stein.  Structured like the Cubist paintings Toklas and Stein collected and Stein emulated in her own writing, The Mademoiselles is a play about Toklas falling in love: with art, with Paris, with Gertrude, and with a new part of herself.  More than that, though, it is a play about remembering falling in love, after everything is lost. 

Stage Left Studio Theatre; NYC; March 2012

Dead Pinocchio Theatre; Albion, MI; October 2011