Gertrude Stein:
As an adapter of literary work, however, Galati is somewhat less successful. Unshakably faithful, even to a fault, he’s partial to long passages of unedited narration and dialogue straight from his source. Galati’s fidelity may be admirable, but often it has the opposite effect of the one intended. Rather than spellbinding the audience, his approach more often anesthetizes them to the beauty of a particular passage. Like a nattily dressed but monotonous storyteller, he attracts more attention to the trappings of the tale than to the content.
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If you asked me to recount what I remember from previous Galati productions, I’d tell you a lot more about scenery and costumes than character or plot. Springing to mind are an image of the Joad family packing into an old jalopy in Galati’s much lauded but somewhat dull The Grapes of Wrath and an exquisite backdrop from She Always Said, Pablo. Even in the Galati-directed Goodman production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale a few years back, what sticks in my mind are the beautiful dresses and suits.
Despite Stein’s talents as a wordsmith, she is certainly an acquired taste. And though there are passages of uncommon beauty and delicacy in “Melanctha,” it’s not a work that translates easily to the stage–it’s almost devoid of playable action, and its emotions are always restrained. Predictably, Galati combats whatever faults Stein may have as a dramatist by embracing rather than shying away from her hypnotic, repetitive prose. Using the traditional reader’s-theater style with which he’s forged a national reputation, he employs two narrators to speak the thoughts of Melanctha and Jefferson; when the two lead characters speak for themselves, Galati revels in the maddening repetitions of Stein’s dialogue, allowing pages of conversation to go on uninterrupted where a judicious editor might have got out some scissors.
