The Marriage of Alice B Toklas, written by Edward Einhorn, is a snapshot of the extraordinary interwar period in which Paris was the epicentre of Modernist genius. Or rather, it is two pictures: the first, a comic farce, and the second, a tragedy. Though the empty frames on the set are meant to evoke the art the Stein household famously collected (touchingly replaced with a single painting in the second act), the focus is on Stein and Toklas as collectors of people, the accomplished artists and writers at the imagined wedding of the pair.
The wedding guests, more than 30 in all, are portrayed by four actors. This succeeds due to strong acting from the whole cast, but two performances deserve particular mention. Barsha, as Stein, anchors the production. The gravity and deadpan charm they bring to the role makes it self-evident why Stein was the sun around which all the other celestial figures revolved. Alyssa Simon’s Toklas provides the contrasting girlish emotion: besotted, loyal, and amusingly obsessed with genius for reasons that become more heart-wrenching in the second act.
The production’s abundant playfulness, both in its witty words and physical comedy, is hugely enjoyable in the first act. The transition to the darker second act is largely effective, but many of the themes transiently touched upon earlier – the nature of pretence, genius, and the creation of meaning in art and in life – are left under-explored.
The somewhat uncomfortable manner in which the two parts relate to each other is, in itself, an interesting friction. It might also suggest some uncertainty in what this play wants to be: a frothy confection, or a nuanced portrait of a complex relationship? There are some lengthy scenes that appear caught between these interpretations, without fully advancing either. At the same time, the grand sweep of the drama ends up simplifying or ignoring important aspects of Stein: it touches upon her Jewishness, but not her controversial relationship with France’s Vichy government; her lesbian identity, but not her complicated relation to feminism.
It might be fairer to describe The Marriage of Alice B Toklas as portraying not just an imagined wedding, but also largely-invented central characters loosely inspired by historical figures. Within that frame, it is a boldly creative and often beautiful work of art, presenting the comedy and tragedy of a marriage and supplying both laughs and heart in ample measure.
