This was the craziest little gig. One week of work on He Said It (written in 1915), part of a double bill of Gertrude Stein plays, along with White Wines. Typical of influential women artists, Stein is someone we often hear about, but seldom hear from. Stein scholar Adam Frank of UBC started with a question: do her plays work? So Adam produced a series of recordings (I did He Said It with Lucia Frangione and composer/musician Dave Chokroun), which he found encouraging enough to gamble on putting a couple of pieces onstage.

Here's what it felt like to spend a week inside the brain of Gertrude Stein: fascinating, frustrating, liberating, flibbertigibbet, a cow. In Adam Frank's arrangement of the text, Sarah May and I loosely took on the roles of Gertrude and her life partner Alice B. Toklas, with Dave as a sort of Narrator/Looming Male Presence. Jimmy Tait – a beloved mainstay of Vancouver theatre, whom I had heard much about but never met – encouraged us to make bold and definite choices about what was going on in the moment, without worrying too much about the whole. So there were little status games and competitions; flirtations and rejections; fears about the outside world, and desperate searches for comfort in the domestic. And there was jazz.

"I was very pleased with embroidery very very pleased with embroidery."

I enjoyed my collaborators immensely. I also learned a great deal from the other company, and from the audience.

White Wines was set to music by Dorothy Chang and tackled by four singers as a blend of choral spoken word and avant-garde opera. Watching them for the first time on opening day, Sarah May and I were reminded of how much of Stein is sonority and swing, and how far you can go by digging into the poetry with precision and verve. The women of White Wines told us that they learned from watching our piece because it sounded like actual conversation – or fragments of many conversations – and we brought a real emotional, psychological dimension to it. I thought Adam could retitle his evening in the style of a dish at a fancy restaurant: "Stein, Two Ways."

The audience for this staged reading – who were these people? The house was packed, and not with a theatre crowd – was vastly different on each of the evenings. Our opening night spectators were giddy and ready to laugh at anything, so the show played as a sophisticated little divertissement. The next night was full of serious people: luckily for us, they felt attentive rather than cold. On instinct, instead of trying to beat the laughs out of them, we just kept plugging into each other: the whole tone of the show became more introspective, vulnerable, and sad (Jimmy and Adam said they much preferred that version). I'm not sure how much of the shift was our doing (second night, settling in) and how much of it was theirs: but the post-show cocktail reception was just as enthusiastic both nights, and these were not theatre people who try to buck you up after opening. As Jimmy said in rehearsal: perform strong clear actions, and people will project onto it whatever they need to. And it's all good.