Village, A.
SIGNED BY STEIN AND LASCAUX
Stein, Gertrude. A Village Are You Ready Yet Not Yet. A Play in Four Acts. Illustré de lithographies par Elie Lascaux. Paris: Galerie Simon, (1928).
8vo.; cream printed wrappers; deckled edges; publisher’s glassine. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition; 90 numbered copies signed by Stein and Lascaux and printed on Vergé des Manufactures d’Arches, numbered 11-100 (this is copy #91), 112 copies the entire edition. Sold by subscription with a prepublication price of 150 francs, or 200 after its release. Wilson A11a.
Written in 1923 and published with the help of Picasso’s dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, A Village Are You Ready Yet Not Yet is one of Stein’s earliest landscape plays. Kahnweiler would also collaborate with Stein on another artist’s book, Book Concluding with As a Wife Has a Cow (1926), with lithographs by Juan Gris (ed. Karen Lane Rood, Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 4: American Writers in Paris, 1920-1939, Thomson Gale, 1980, pp. 361-373). Stein was a great admirer of Lascaux, saying once that in all his works there exists “that white light which is the light that Elie Lascaux has inside him” (http://www.yale.edu/opa/ v28.n17/story13.html).
A Village Are You Ready Yet Not Yet is the most literal example of Stein’s dramaturgical theory that all plays should be, first and foremost, pictorial landscapes. Lascaux’s charming black and white drawings provide a visual background not unlike that of a fairytale or children’s book, and while the action in the play is difficult to map, the cacophony of voices present in the text creates a distinct atmosphere. Though Stein sets the piece in the genre of theatre by calling it “a play in four acts,” there are no listed or named characters, no stage directions, and no traditional indications other than Stein’s subtitle that it is, in fact, a play. It is unlikely that A Village Are You Ready Yet Not Yet has ever been performed; there is no mention of any production in the standard references.
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