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The Marriage that Would Have Attracted Everybody Who Was Anybody

12 Jul 2025

Edward Einhorn writes about the background, staging and transfer of his play The Marriage of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein from New York to London.

The free spirit of the Fringe seems just right for the comedy of the show

The Marriage of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein premiered in 2017 in New York City at a small theatre called HERE. Originally conceived during the fight to legalise gay marriage, it was inspired by a simple thought: what if Gertrude Stein and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, had been legally allowed to get married – way back, when in Paris in the 1930s? What if they had been able not only to acknowledge their lesbian identities, but to celebrate them? What if they had also felt comfortable acknowledging their Jewish identities, and held a big wedding with all the literati, under a chuppah (the traditional Jewish wedding canopy)?

The guest list would certainly be impressive. They were all part of what Gertrude Stein called “The Lost Generation” – a generation looking for meaning after World War I (and before World War II). They knew anyone worth knowing who passed through Paris: Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, Jean Cocteau, Sylvia Beach, Francis Picabia, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound... the list goes on. And with Picasso's many wives and mistresses, Hemingway’s own romantic misadventures (and obsession with matadors), the play seemed obvious material for a farce.

When the play premiered in New York, we were lucky enough to have Jesse Green, the new chief reviewer of The New York Times, drop by – and he gave us a Critic’s Pick! The theatre filled up, and the experience was a true joy.

Buoyed by that experience, I contacted a few London theatres about working together on the production, and Jermyn Street Theatre expressed interest. We planned a production for spring 2020... which got cancelled when Covid came along. But fortunately they kept the project alive, and two years later they produced the play for a six-week run. It was something of a dream come true.

Over the years, I’ve been attending the Edinburgh Fringe, and I’ve fallen in love. The free spirit of the Fringe seems just right for the comedy of the show – and hopefully the audience will forgive a couple of sad and serious moments as well, because the joy and the tragedy of the play go hand in hand. It’s all pretend.

Our original Toklas (Alyssa Simon, who also played the role in London) and our original Hemingway (Grant Neale) are along for the ride, as well as two amazing new performers playing Stein (Barsha) and Picasso (Jenny Lee Mitchell). And we are supported by the producer James Simon, who has consistently been an advocate for our play along the way.

I know for some, this will be their first real introduction to Stein, so here are some fun facts: in many ways, Stein is the mother of all experimental theatre. She wrote plays and opera, and she was one of the first to bring modernism onto the stage. The term “gay” to refer to homosexual comes from Stein’s writing. She wrote this about herself and Toklas: “To be regularly gay was to do every day the gay thing that they did every day. To be regularly gay was to end every day at the same time after they had been regularly gay.”

And of course, Stein, a lover of repetition in writing, also wrote: “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” And when speaking of her hometown of Oakland, she lamented: “There’s no there there.”

So I hope you can raise a tiny, tiny cup of champagne with us (we have a champagne toast in the theatre), and celebrate the lives of Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein – what they did, what they could have done, and what their lives mean to lesbians, Jews, artists, and of course, everyone who celebrates love.

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