The Odyssey Theater’s unique way of celebrating its fiftieth anniversary is to revisit seminal plays from 1967-71 which inspired the Odyssey’s artistic director, Ron Sossi, to start a company of his own. One of those “golden oldies” was In Circles, the Gertrude Stein/Al Carmines avant-garde musical. First done at New York’s Judson Memorial Church (where Carmines was a Reverend), the show later transferred to the Cherry Lane Theatre, where it ran for a year and won an Obie. In Circles is based on “A Circular Play: A Play in Circles,” a collection of texts Stein published in 1920. Carmines set music to those texts, and director Lawrence Kornfeld devised the action. Now, 52 years later, David Schweizer has re-directed the show, which features Jacque Lynn Colton as Gertrude Stein. Remarkably, Colton was in the original New York production, playing an ingénue. “We gathered in Al’s living room with just 12 typewritten pages,” she recalled in a program note. “We were encouraged to develop our own characters and to take any line we liked—if another cast member felt attached to that line, they could repeat it . . . Everyone who does the show has to reinvent it, according to who’s in it and what the relationships are.” Schweizer added his own observation: “The actual working script for In Circles only exists hand-written (in fact, SCRAWLED!) with many cross-outs on musical note paper and is very challenging to read.” Fortunately, the press kit for this revival includes Stein’s poem as an aid to comprehension, though with lines like, “Were we at home. In messages, in sending messages, in quarreling, in shooting, in endangering, in resolving and in destroying there is a course of events. Honeysuckle grows and peas. Can you sing together….Not a circular saw…” it is still hard to make sense of it. But despite such a reaction, we are still caught up in Schweizer’s handling of the obscure text. He and designer Mark Guirgis have come up with an all-red stage which became a striking background for the white-clad, eight-person ensemble. With names like “Ollie, An Englishman from England” and “Sylvia, She can think of kissing him,” they glide round the stage, singing and dancing to the piano accompaniment of Dole (“He plays the piano. They do not have a mechanical piano”), real name Kenneth J. Grimes. At the center of the circle of performers sits Jacque Lynn Colton as Gertrude Stein. Clad in a woolen skirt and man’s vest, Colton is an impressive and impassive figure. Every once in a while she utters a line, like “Papa dozes…Mama Blows her Noses” or “Oh How We Love to Knead Bread,” whimsical cues for one or more of the talented cast to burst into song or do some hoofing.. Carmine’s melodious score references many different genres: lullaby, ragtime, ballad, spiritual, even barbershop quartet. Stein’s lyrics also alternate between serious and funny, sarcasm and whimsy, puns and non sequiturs. Schweizer imbues everything with a slightly campy quality, his way of paying tribute to “the excitement of the absurdist and often GAY energy pouring forth from the cafes and makeshift spaces of ‘downtown’ New York City.”
