Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (1938) is a libretto for an opera by the American modernist playwright and poet Gertrude Stein. For avant-garde theatre artists from the United States, the text has formed something of a rite of passage—the Judson Poets’ Group, the Living Theatre, Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson and the Wooster Group have all produced versions.
Stein wrote the piece during what critics often refer to as the final or 'narrative' period of her playwriting career. From 1932 onwards, she had begun to rediscover and reintegrate stories into her dramatic writing, an element hitherto she has worked studiously to exclude. In a letter to Carl Van Vechten she identified her work on this text as marking something of a breakthrough: "I have been struggling with this problem of dramatic narrative and in [Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights] I think I got it."[1] Despite her new-found use for narrative, Stein did not, as Ryan puts it, "leap foolishly into ordinary comprehensibility."[2]
The structure of action in Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights does not resemble that which is traditionally thought to constitute a play. The progressive development of a coherent plot that unfolds through the interaction between a configuration of figures is, however, just discernible. These include Faustus’ relationship to Mephisto, Faustus and Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel, and the pairings of minor characters (Boy and Dog, Boy and Girl, Dog Mephisto and Viper, Country Woman Viper and MIHA, the Man from Overseas and Faustus, he and MIHA). The text, though, does not allow for so stable a diagramming or such coherent identities. Like the speech-headings in Elizabethan and Jacobean texts, Stein describes her characters in a number of different ways, suggesting some degree of multiplicity in her conception of dramatic character (one that is most obviously and explicitly present in the multiple characterization of "Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel").
The play adopts a number of textual strategies that presuppose a relationship to performance, though it is performance conceived in a distinctly modernist way: as spatial meaning (like Artaud’s mise en scène or Brecht’s Gestus), self-referential (as Beckett’s work increasingly became or as in Brechtian 'quotation'), and unconstrained by any adherence to the conventions associated with traditional dramatic literature (from which each of these practitioners have displayed varying degrees of independence). Like Beckett, Stein is interested in an aesthetic of surfaces—of formal elements interacting in space—which do not serve the traditional purpose of the imitation of action. The aesthetic assumptions about performance embodied in Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights and the ambiguity in its textual composition produce elements unanchored from a referential process towards any reality other than its own occasion; it suggests a fully self-referential performance.
The piece opens with Faustus (his precise name shifts and alters during the course of the drama) looking out from the doorway to his study, which streams with intense white light from beyond, when Mephisto appears:
Despite this opening, however, Stein proceeds to marginalize the Faustian struggle between good and evil within the breast of Man, which is traditionally played out through the relation between Faustus and Mephistophles, in favour of a conflict (if the play can be said to have a dramatic conflict in the traditional sense of the word) between Faustus and "Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel." In Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, Stein—a highly-experimental modernist writer—dramatizes an archetypal modernist myth (of Man’s uneasy relationship with his machines) from the competing—and gendered—perspective(s) of the multiple woman.