'The Marriage of Alice B Toklas by Gertrude Stein' poster by Carolyn Raship.[Missing Credit]
Make-believe is crucial to the story. The play sees its four main actors - Barsha as Gertrude Stein, Alyssa Simon as Alice B Toklas, Grant Neale as Ernest Hemingway, and Jenny Lee Mitchell as Pablo Picasso – stepping into the role of some 30 other characters, and the leading women Barsha (dry, captivating) and Simon (charming, exuberant), oftentimes assume each other’s characters for one-liners and asides.
Einhorn was surely inspired, if not for the play’s title than for the entirety of its content, by the identity-blending nature of The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, a book written by Stein pretending to be her partner.
Being Jewish and lesbian in a world that scorned both surely led Stein and Toklas to partake in quite a bit of pretending during their lives; to witness the albeit fictional wedding between the two modernist lovers, situated beneath a makeshift chuppah on stage, seems a kind of moving rectification of all the pretending they needed to do just to be able to call one another “my wife.”
But this play about a pretend marriage is also a play about genius: who possesses it, who dictates it, and what kind of role it plays in a relationship where one person has it and the other does not.
According to this band of intellectuals, one must be either a “Spaniard, a homosexual or a Jew” to be a genius, and Stein, who famously equated genius with masculinity, leaned into her approximation of manliness.
From left: Barsha as Gertrude Stein, Jenny Lee Mitchell as Pablo Picasso, Alyssa Simon as Alice B Toklas pretending to be Alfred Whitehead, and Grant Neale as Ernest Hemingway in 'The Marriage of Alice B Toklas by Gertrude Stein' at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. (Photo: Edward Einhorn)[Missing Credit]
The love between the pair is tempered by a tinge of resentment from Toklas, who plays the housewife to Stein’s husband, made to entertain the other wives of geniuses while her own genius partner discusses intellectual matters with the men.
“If there were four Alices, Gertrude might not be able to love Alice as much, because there would be as many Alices as Gertrudes,” Toklas thoughtfully posits. “If there were five Alices, that would be too many Alices.”
That there is not as much room in the relationship for Toklas as there is for Stein is clear even through the enigmatic phrasing, and the play wrestles with this tension with impressive subtlety, seen occasionally as a flicker of emotion on Toklas’s face, so quick you might miss it.
In one of many cases where the fourth wall is broken, Toklas argues with a drunken Hemingway – played with amusing panache by Neale - that the show is a comedy, not, as Hemingway insists, a tragedy. But slapstick charades and absurdist dialogue aside, he is half-right: something more profound and existential thrums beneath the surface of this play, a thing which is continually, rivetingly, pretending to be another.
The Marriage of Alice B Toklas by Gertrude Stein is on at the Edinburgh Fringe until August 25 at Dram at Gilded Balloon Patter House.
