Radio Free Stein: Gertrude Stein's Parlor Plays
by Adam J. Frank
Northwestern UP, 2024
ISBN: 9780810148062
https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810148062/radio-free-stein/
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.
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"With dazzling online recordings and scripts, Radio Free Stein takes readers backstage to reveal the inventive workshop process Adam Frank has used in productions of Gertrude Stein’s early voice plays. The 1934 NBC radio interview Stein gave on her US tour resonated with her playwriting “by making audience available as feeling” and Frank brilliantly renders this insight in productions that capture the plays’ strange and arresting illocutionary force."—Linda Voris, American University
“Radio Free Stein’s fluent roving across considerations of performance, psychoanalytic theorization of the radio, and philosophical and queer theories of the performative is brilliant and compelling. This is a significant contribution to both Stein studies and modern theater studies, as well as media and modernist studies.”—E. L. McCallum, Michigan State University
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.
