Uncloseting Drama: Gertrude Stein and the Wooster Group
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the late winter and early spring of 2005, the New York theatre troupe the Wooster Group staged, both in Brooklyn and Manhattan, a limited return engagement of their 1999 piece House/Lights, an “adaptation” of Gertrude Stein's 1938 play Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights. The word “adaptation” belongs firmly in scare quotes, not only because it is a methodological description that the members of the Wooster Group would themselves resist, but also because it simultaneously over- and underrepresents the terms of the group's engagement with Stein's text. If an adaptation is a modified version of a work that nevertheless retains the integrity of and an obvious resemblance to the original, then House/Lights falls short of the mark; it is, rather, an eccentric pastiche of many source materials, among which Doctor Faustus comprises only one elliptically integrated element. Yet, at the same time as House/Lights fails to meet the requirements of an adaptation – and precisely on account of the manner in which it does so – the piece also exceeds the constraints of mere modification and offers instead a rigorous and sophisticated interpretation of Stein's text. Of course, every theatrical presentation of a play is an act of interpretation, but the singular nature of the Wooster Group's approach constitutes a mode of analysis more akin to the work of literary criticism than it is to the goals of traditional dramaturgy. In short, the Wooster Group highlights the potential of performance to embody a way of reading, and House/Lights highlights, in particular, a way of reading the notoriously difficult Stein. In turn, I propose a reading of Stein alongside – and through the lens of – the Wooster Group, in order to underscore the ways in which the group's complex performance amplifies shades of meaning already at play in Stein's correspondingly complex writing.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it