Moments before a recent dress rehearsal, New Haven Theater Company costumer Elizabeth Saylor nipped into the vintage store that serves as front of house to borrow period-appropriate clip earrings. Company member Trevor Williams worked with director John Strano to hang replicas of Gertrude Stein’s art collection on the walls before trading off the care of two small children with Jodi Williams so she could change into the decidedly non-maternal Dorothy Parker. Before donning her Gertrude Stein costume, Deena Nicol-Blifford led the cast in vocal warm-ups, then slipped backstage to help producer/stage manager J. Kevin Smith prep props, including a lot of pre-poured (also replica) cocktails. The tray looked like it was headed for a wedding reception.
But Little Wars, NHTC’s latest sold-out production, isn’t that kind of party. Sure, the drinks flow (and sometimes fly), but the characters, most of them famous women authors (the play passes the Bechdel test in its first minute), are gathered at the country home of Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein in 1940, during the last moments before the fall of France.
Little Wars is a work of counterfactual history, though not with the usual what-if-the-other-guys-won dystopianism. Instead, the conceit asks: What if individuals found it in themselves to do more?
In an early scene, the mysterious Mary, played by Abby Klein, stops by to collect donations for her mission. Having put together enough to save three Jewish people, Toklas and Stein express a preference for “a child, a woman” and “someone good,” almost as if they are shopping. Intrigued by the guest list of the impending dinner-less dinner party, Mary decides to stay. She plays her cards close to her chest, but we suspect she isn’t just starstruck; she knows that writers have power. While she’s smuggling people, perhaps they can capture hearts and minds. But first: cocktails.
Playwright Steven Carl McCasland captures something of Stein’s voice as it sounds in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933): simultaneously blunt and obtuse, tyrannical and poetic, and always, always playfully aware of itself as a collection of words. “I am an artist of art.” “Interesting is what interests us.” This could be infuriating (some found it so in real life), but Nicol-Blifford lends warmth and authenticity to this borrowed voice. Her Gertrude is expansive, the king of her castle, but as big-hearted as she is proud. Her relationship with Alice, played by Ash Lago in her second show with NHTC, bristles with conflict and glows with affection. Lago is especially moving in a scene in which Alice shows us the little war she personally wages with anticipatory grief; time is moving fast and Gertrude’s health is uncertain.
Sandra Rodriguez’s Lillian Hellman delivers cool quips with an underlying ferocity. Margaret Mann’s Agatha Christie is prim one moment and bold the next. The fictional maid Bernadette is played with quiet gravitas by Lynnette Victoria. Dorothy Parker, played by Jodi Williams, is generally a hot mess, but sometimes you need one to get the party moving toward its climax. The women spar with each other for a long time before they have any attention to pay to the real enemy.
If you’re just meeting Gertrude and Alice, or really any of these writers, you’ll want to Google how they actually spent their war years, because it wasn’t lining hats with cash to fund the extractions of their fellow Jews. The mortal Stein, for example, claimed that Marshal Petain’s capitulation to the Nazis was the “miracle” that would save France. The truths in this play are not facts.
Nor, to my knowledge, did the real-life Stein ever declare herself “an artist of art,” but she did famously write that “a rose is a rose is a rose.” Hemingway once retorted that “a bitch is a bitch is a bitch.” This Gertrude happily owns that aspect of her reputation, including in her sparring with “Lily Ann,” as she deliberately mispronounces Lilian’s name.
Ironically, it isn’t the literary but rather the prosaic characters who get saddled with the odd over-written line, the text indulging figurative language where the stark horror of facts needs no ornament. But writers, as the play itself contends, are imperfect vehicles of truth.
NHTC stands out from many community theaters not just for the talent and dedication of its members, but also for their tendency to choose more novel and intellectually engaging material. Little Wars embodies that ambition. Art isn’t just an opportunity to stop and smell the roses. It’s a chance to step in and out of history, the better to see the alternatives embedded in the facts. Who comes out smelling like one of those roses? Who is the bitch? At the end of this night, the curtain-less curtain call found the small audience on their feet, clapping for what they saw here, these things that never were.
Written and photographed by Sarah Harris Wallman. From left, image features Sandra Rodriguez, Margaret Mann, Abby Klein, Jodi Williams, Deena Nicol-Blifford and Lynnette Victoria.
