Revisiting Gertrude Stein

Lamont Johnson first directed Gertrude Stein’s play “Yes Is for a Very Young Man” in 1949 in New York. The players? Some unknowns named Bea Arthur, Gene Saks and Kim Stanley.

Brooks Atkinson, reviewing the production for the New York Times, wrote, “The Off Broadway actors are not quite that sublime at the moment, and Lamont Johnson, the director, has not found the way to weave Miss Stein’s random, prolix remarks into a flowing pattern.”

Now Johnson is taking another crack at it--at the 57-seat Interact Theater in North Hollywood.

He’s got two Emmy awards and another seven nominations for directing under his belt. He’s directed 13 feature films, including 1973’s “Last American Hero.” He’s staged plays for the Center Theatre Group, the Westwood (now Geffen) Playhouse, and even directed “Orfeo” for the Los Angeles Opera.

“Here I am at 75 returning to a play I began to work with at 22,” said Johnson, who acted in the play even before directing it, in its U.S. premiere, at the Pasadena Playhouse. “But it seems all brand new to me. There’s a lot of freshness in it.”

In 1945, Johnson and his wife, Toni Merrill, were actors with a USO company touring Europe. They happened to be in Paris shortly after Stein had--with much fanfare--returned to her apartment. After Germany conquered France in 1940, Stein and companion Alice B. Toklas had laid low in a small village.

The World War II years were miserable in France. In the earlier part of the century, however, Paris was the hotbed for European and American artists. At the center of that was Stein, whose salons were the gathering point for painters such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, and expatriate writers, including Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Johnson dialed Stein’s number listed in a pre-war phone book, and Toklas invited the young actors over. In Stein’s apartment, where Picasso’s portrait of her hung over the fireplace, the Johnsons sipped tea. But rather than make polite chit-chat, Johnson and Stein debated whether Henri Petain’s collaboration with the Germans helped or hurt the French.

“Suddenly Stein just came over and hugged me,” Johnson said. “She loved a good argument and she was tired of sycophants who said, ‘Oh, Miss Stein, you’re wonderful, what do you think about . . .’ ”

Stein showed the couple her new play, which was inspired by her recent experiences in the southern French countryside. An American expatriate, Stein saw parallels between the Civil War and the situation in Vichy France. Families were horribly divided, fighting one another in their living rooms and occasionally on the battlefield.

Such ideas permeate “Yes Is for a Very Young Man.” The play has five scenes, scattered between the Franco-German armistice in 1940 and seven weeks after the Allied invasion at Normandy in 1944--from the death of France to its rebirth.

Though she’s best known for nurturing a creative atmosphere for artists, Stein wrote more than 500 works herself. Some scholars and critics regard her prose as excitingly innovative; others consider it tediously eccentric. “Yes” is one of the few full-length plays she wrote--and is the most straightforward.

Its relative directness is no accident. The play was a tribute to the spirit of the French people who had already endured tremendous losses during the first World War, only to face occupation by the German army 23 years later. “She wanted a large audience and wanted it to be appreciated,” Johnson said.

Johnson bought the rights for $1,000 and took it back to the Pasadena Playhouse to produce. Interest was particularly high because this was Stein’s first stage work since the libretto for the striking opera “Four Saints in Three Acts.”

“Yes,” however, needed some rewrites, which resulted in an ongoing correspondence between Johnson and Stein. He still has copies of her letters explaining aspects of the play and characters.

Johnson obviously has fond memories of the experience. He starred opposite his wife during a run in March 1946, which was covered by Time and Life magazines. But he’s doesn’t romanticize the quality of the Pasadena Playhouse production. “We couldn’t have been very good,” he said. “We were young and not particularly good actors.”

Nevertheless, someone was ready to bankroll a Broadway production--as long as Stein came to the U.S. for publicity. She declined. When she died later in 1946, interest withered. Three years passed before the Off-Broadway Players asked Johnson to come direct the play in New York. “Then,” said Johnson, “it sank into oblivion.”

It was the 50th anniversary of the Pasadena staging that got Johnson thinking about “Yes” again. He landed at Interact at the invitation of member John Rubinstein. Johnson had directed Rubenstein in a production of “The Tempest” at UCLA in 1979, and in the 1990 mini-series “Voices Within: The Lives of Truddi Chase.” Johnson had also come to see Rubinstein’s work at Interact.

Rubinstein, who serves on Interact’s artistic board, read the play and didn’t know what to make of it. Typical of Stein’s writing--a literary answer to Cubism--the dialogue is thick and circular, rhythmic but repetitive. Ferdinand’s opening line, for example: “Denise, I do take your side, I do, I do take your side, I take everybody’s side. Don’t keep at me, you make me cry, I know you’re miserable. I take everybody’s side, that is the way I am, I do take everybody’s side.”

To Johnson, the repetition is operatic, each refrain restating and expanding on a theme. But Rubinstein wasn’t sure it would fly on stage.

“But by God, you get good actors playing those parts . . . and when you put the emotions and the blood and reality under those pseudo poetic words and repetitions, it’s extremely moving,” Rubinstein said. “I was blown away when I saw it.”

Interact put on two readings of the play before deciding on a full-scale production. The company, which started as an informal play-reading group, has become a force in Los Angeles theater since incorporating in 1992. Its revival of “Counsellor-at-Law”--which Rubinstein directed and acted in--won four Ovation awards in 1995. “Into the Woods” was a sell-out last year. “Juno and the Paycock” just received five L.A. Drama Critics Circle nominations and moved to the Hudson Theatre in Hollywood, where it is still playing.

Despite its success, Interact remains in an out-of-the way neighborhood, even by North Hollywood standards. The blue-and-white concrete block theater--easily mistakable for an auto body shop--is surrounded by aging apartment buildings. It is a highbrow cultural outpost in a blue-collar neighborhood.

On a recent warm afternoon, Johnson sat in the front row of the small theater while the cast ran through Act 2 of “Yes Is for a Very Young Man.” His script lay on the seat next to him, yet he never referred to it as he filled in lines for a missing actor, or supplied relevant sound effects. When one actor got too rattled to find the right tone for a line, Johnson became a sympathetic coach. “Don’t strain for it,” he told the actor. “It’s going to come. We’re not even off scripts yet.”

Stacy Ray has a small advantage when it comes to knowing her lines. She was cast as the American woman, Constance, for the first readings of “Yes” at Interact nearly two years ago. Johnson, she says, is the kind of director actors dream about working with.

“He not only knows the play, he knows Gertrude Stein sitting in front of him telling him about the characters,” she said. “Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas and the war and Paris--he brings all that in.” Fellow cast member Josh Adell agreed. “He was in France and he just knows the landscape out of which the play was written--not only the political landscape, but the emotional landscape.”

Johnson says he has discovered subtleties in the play he’d missed in his youthful encounters with it. “We were so impressed with our properties that we didn’t really delve,” he said. But with five decades of maturity and experience, Johnson read “Yes” again with completely different eyes. “It began to open like a rose.”

Megan Zakar, who plays the politically ungrounded Denise, said the cast can tell that Johnson has a clear picture of this play that he is trying to realize.

“It’s like it’s in his bones,” she said. “He’s been living with it for so many years, he just knows immediately if something is right or wrong.”*

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“YES IS FOR A VERY YOUNG MAN,” Interact Theatre, 11855 Hart St., North Hollywood. Dates: Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Indefinitely. Price: $20. Phone: (818) 789-8499.