IN 1933, at their modest house in rural France, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas passed an eerie, troubled summer.
“That summer things happened,” sings Stein in “Blood on the Dining Room Floor,” an opera by Jonathan Sheffer at the WPA Theatre’s Peter Norton Space.
Drawing upon several texts of the period, Sheffer has, on his own, concocted an explanation of those events.
He goes first of all to Stein’s “Blood on the Dining Room Floor” itself, an out-of-print 1948 “mystery” novel in which the author muses about her friend’s bewildering death.
Sheffer has supplemented that with passages from “The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook” that outline methods of killing on carp and pigeons (bloody texts themselves), and with snippets from various other Stein texts.
The music is a simple, clear idiom that lets the ideas breathe.
Making sense of Stein’s offerings is an old habit of her followers. In this case, the results are amusing and provocative.
We open and close with Toklas bringing flowers to Stein’s grave, along with an explanation of the long-ago events.
During the summer in question, Stein and Toklas receive a visit from another lesbian couple, who frolic through the countryside with microscopes (intended rather as a parody of Stein) and cuddle puppies.
When the younger of the couple is cast off for another, she is mysteriously found dead, shot twice in the head. Police ruled the shooting a suicide, but the truth is uncertain.
There’s a ubiquitous manservant who enjoys tinkering with cars, and who winds up fired after Stein and Toklas suspect him of disabling their two autos and cutting the cord on their telephone. It’s all grist for Stein’s pen, as she sits at the tea table writing and Alice perches at the typewriter.
Stein may scribble, however Toklas emerges years later as the keener interpreter of reality – as we hear in her final explanation of their friend’s death.
Director Jeremy Dobrish and designer Steven Capone have smoothly deployed their modernist spaces to suggest the strange energies of France in one strange summer.
It is enchanting to see and hear all these loose snippets of Stein and Toklas put musically together by Sheffer.
The couple is made to dance a coherent dance by Sheffer – but the coherence is mainly Sheffer’s.
This should be seen as a work of Sheffer’s, no more Stein’s than “Picasso at the Lapin Agile” is by Picasso. That said, it is delightful.
—–
BLOOD ON THE DINING ROOM FLOOR
Peter Norton Space, 555 W. 42nd St., between 10th and 11th avenues; (212) 244-7529. Through Sunday.