Stein’s giddy use of words, set to music

The actors were getting tongue-tied as they struggled to learn the lyrics of a new musical about author Gertrude Stein. One by one, they stumbled and stuttered over lines drawn from Stein’s own idiosyncratic works: “And to in and in and six and another.”

But director Frank Galati and composer Stephen Flaherty have experience in tackling tough material. After all, they helped turn E.L. Doctorow’s sprawling novel, “Ragtime,” into a Tony Award-winning musical in 1998.

Now they’ve teamed up for “Loving Repeating: A Musical of Gertrude Stein,” which opens Tuesday at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago for a limited engagement through March 12.

Stein’s writings, Galati told the actors in the rehearsal room, are abstract, playful and repetitive, “like taking a sentence and cutting it up and throwing it in the air.” He reassured them that their effort will pay off with an audience amazed at their verbal mastery.

“It can have the grace of a soft shoe, like scat singing, so it has that bubbling improvisational quality,” said Galati, who often smiles beatifically during rehearsal.

The “chamber musical” -- with a cast of eight plus five musicians -- uses selected writings of the American expatriate writer who declared “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” and coined the term “lost generation” for the disillusioned expatriate writers in Europe after World War I. Christine Mild plays her as a young woman; Cindy Gold takes over for the later years.

Stein is perhaps best known for nurturing and drawing to her Paris salon a celebrated circle of artists, writers and thinkers, including Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway and T.S. Eliot. But the show’s focus is on her passion for life and language and her decades-long relationship with Alice B. Toklas.

Galati is a fixture in the Chicago theater scene and won two Tonys for directing and adapting Steppenwolf Theatre’s production of “The Grapes of Wrath” on Broadway in 1990. But his admiration for Stein’s work dates back much further -- to graduate school at Northwestern University -- and he’s staged several other pieces created or inspired by her.

“There’s still tremendous interest in Gertrude Stein as a historical figure, as a famous person, as a lesbian, a Jew, an exile, a woman, an American, an expatriate,” Galati said. “All these facets of her personality put her in the margin of mainstream culture, and there is now finally a great interest in these marginalized communities and identities.”