“Ladies’ Voices”                    Gertrude Stein

Curtain Raiser

Ladies’ voices give pleasure.

            The acting two is easily lead. Leading is not in winter. Here the winter is sunny.

            Does that surprise you.

            Ladies voices together and then she came in.

            Very well good night.

            Very well good night.

            (Mrs. Cardillac.)

            That’s silver. 

            You mean the sound.

            Yes the sound.

Act II

            Honest to God Miss Williams I don’t mean to say that I was older.

            But you were.

            Yes I was. I do not excuse myself. I feel that there is no reason for passing an archduke.

            You like the word.

            You know very well that they all call it their house.

            As Christ was to Lazarus so was the founder of the hill to Mahon.

            You really mean it.

            I do.

Act III

            Yes Genevieve does not know it. What. That we are seeing Caesar.

            Caeser kisses.

            Kisses today.

            Caesar kisses every day.

            Genevieve does not know that it is only in this country that she could speak as she does.

            She does speak very well doesn’t she. She told them that there was not the slightest intention on the part of her countrymen to eat the fish that was not caught in their country.

            In this she was mistaken.

Act IV

            What are ladies voices.

            Do you mean to believe me.

            Have you caught the sun.

            Dear me have you caught the sun.

Scene II

            Did you say they were different. I said it made no difference.

            Where does it. Yes.

            Mr. Richard Sutherland. This is a name I know.

            Yes.

            The Hotel Victoria.

            Many words spoken to me have seemed English.

            Yes we do hear one another and yet what are called voices the best decision in telling of balls.

            Masked balls.

            Yes masked balls.

            Poor Augustine.                      

"Stein asks the question that is mostly likely in the minds of the audience:—what is Ladies' Voices?> Although Ladies' Voices has neither plot nor dramatic sense of action, the play is about language itself. Traditionally, theatrical language must "coexist with other competing 'languages'—gesture, scenic, space, action" (Bowers Stein 109). However, Stein refuses to partake in this "coexistence." No language can compete with the language of Stein's drama, for it is all about language—language is all there is. It is the recording of the voices, the partial conversations represented that make the action. Stein is clearly more concerned with the ability of language to act on its own, to be its own force. It is in this sense that Ladies' Voices is a postmodern text—the play takes as its subject the very method of its creation. As Bowers finds, "the language of the play is the story; as it is spoken or read, the dialogue creates the world of the play and the state of affairs in that world, or, as Stein put it, the dialogue is 'what made what happened be what it was'" (111). Ladies' Voices is self-reflexive —it is languag about language."