Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights

Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (1938) is a libretto for an opera by the American modernist playwright and poet Gertrude Stein. For avant-garde theatre artists from the United States, the text has formed something of a rite of passage—the Judson Poets' Group, The Living Theatre, Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson, The Wooster Group, and Production Workshop at Brown University have all produced versions. The libretto premiered as a play at Beaver College (now Arcadia University) in 1951 at the launch of the college's theatre program.

Stein wrote the piece during what critics often refer to as the final or narrative period of her playwriting career. From 1932 onwards, she had begun to rediscover and reintegrate stories into her dramatic writing, an element hitherto she has worked studiously to exclude. In a letter to Carl Van Vechten she identified her work on this text as marking something of a breakthrough: "I have been struggling with this problem of dramatic narrative and in [Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights] I think I got it." Despite her new-found use for narrative, Stein did not, as Ryan puts it, "leap foolishly into ordinary comprehensibility."

The structure of action in Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights does not resemble that which is traditionally thought to constitute a play. The progressive development of a coherent plot that unfolds through the interaction between a configuration of figures is, however, just discernible. These include Faustus' relationship to Mephisto, Faustus and Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel, and the pairings of minor characters (Boy and Dog, Boy and Girl, Dog Mephisto and Viper, Country Woman Viper and MIHA, the Man from Overseas and Faustus, he and MIHA). The text, though, does not allow for so stable a diagramming or such coherent identities. Like the speech-headings in Elizabethan and Jacobean texts, Stein describes her characters in a number of different ways, suggesting some degree of multiplicity in her conception of dramatic character (one that is most obviously and explicitly present in the multiple characterization of "Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel").

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