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very fine is my valentine
very fine and very mine
very mine is my valentine
very mine and very fine
very fine is my valentine
and mine very fine very mine
and mine is my valentine.
Gertrude Stein
Since 1957 I have been the director of six plays by Gertrude Stein: In a Garden , What Happened , Play I Play II Play III , A Circular Play a Play in Circles , The Making of Americans , and Listen to Me . These six productions are “very mine” even though they are by Gertrude Stein and Al Carmines and Leon Katz and Meyer Kupfermann and especially the performers who acted and sang and danced them. But they were all very mine even though they were by the people who wrote them and played them. What happened in these productions was what happened to the people who did them. The words and music were not what happened. What happened was that the people who acted and sang and danced were the action the music and the dancing.
Only The Making of Americans was a little different. It was a story about something remembered and continuous most of the time; a story that was about what it was saying it was saying (most of the time) so the actors had to often be pretending. They were pretending most of the time that they were other people being remembered and living in this time, but not themselves. I mean they were not themselves, the real actors on the stage, but people from another place. The other five productions are about what the actors singers and dancers did on the stage when they were on that stage at that time. Many of them don't know this or don't believe this, but it is true and they are mistaken. They were only doing what they were doing at that moment on that stage, even though they repeated the same thing night after night and were not improvising. They were doing what they were doing, not remembering