Jean and I drove all the way across town on a recent Friday night to catch one of the final performances of a “two hander” play about Gertrude Stein and her long-time companion Alice B. Toklas, titled—not surprisingly—Gertrude and Alice (United Players of Vancouver). The play opens with Gertrude (played by Tanja Dixon-Warren) and Alice (played by Kelsi James) walking from the wings to front and centre stage, where Gertrude addresses the audience directly. “How many of you have read all of my writing?” An embarrassed silence. “Well then, how many of you have read three or more of my books?” Well, I’d read Stein’s bestseller The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas years ago, and somewhat later, Paris France. And I’d started on Stein’s first book, Three Lives—but had stalled about one and a half lives in. So it seemed best to keep my hands firmly in my lap, since I had no desire to go one on one with Gertrude, particularly in front of an audience: she was formidable! A force! And—in the opinion of many, including both Alice and Gertrude Stein herself—a genius! The play, written in 2018 by Anna Chatterton, Evalyn Parry and Karin Randoja, was a lot of fun: Gertrude and Alice trade banter as they lead us through the story of their forty-year relationship, and, following Gertrude’s death in 1946, the twenty-one years that Alice lived on in Paris by herself. By the end of the play I think that most of us had been convinced—or nearly so—that Gertrude might have been a genius after all. For my part, I thought that I might make one more attempt to finish Three Lives when I got home.

—Michael Hayward