The 1970s theatre/performance opposition took its primary conceptual basis from the attempts to erase text from the theatre. Roland Barthes’ well-known formula of theatricality was theatre-minus-text; and this formula went into the field of performance. Hans-Thies Lehmann argued that drama went beyond itself after the 1970s; thereby he derived the term of postdramatic. According to all these formulas, text seems to be excluded from theatre; but is the essence of the matter that simple?

To be able to grasp the ontological transformation of not only theatre but drama since the 1970s; it was necessary to evaluate carefully without falling into various academic clichés of the erosion of dramatic structure and of the new understanding of textuality. As a matter of fact, in experimental theatre attempts of the 1970s, text was not totally rejected: in the experimental theatre from Robert Wilson to Richard Foreman or in the new-textuality from Sarah Kane to Martin Crimp, the density of the word and writing was altered; thus, a hybridization that exceeded both the theatre and performance classic definitions was revealed. 

The Historical Avant-garde period’s first objection to text was at the centre of dramatic structure. But, if The Theater and its Double of Antonin Artaud’s dated 1938 is carefully examined, it can be seen that all the anti-textual arguments were based on the logocentric structure of the theatre. In his work, Artaud explained that a Western individual who abstracts life through a system of thoughts was imprisoned in his/her mind and language. The word derived from the mind kills the magic of life, and civilized man was lost in a dead intellectual notion. Theatre derived from the western mind is shaped in a text axis due to its logocentric character and as such, it was doomed to be dead theatre without magic. Artaud wanted to enliven the Western theatre that had become an inanimate representation. Apparently, in order to be freed from the logocentric nature of Western theatre, erasing text from the theatre was the only solution for Artaud.

In this article, in contrast with Antonin Artaud from Continental Europe who objected to the “rational word” logos and therefore to text; Gertrude Stein from the American continent was examined because she tried to reject logos which fastened to Western theatre with a tight belt without negating text, while writing her first play What Happened. Instead of negating text, Stein tried to remove the “sequence-of-events” of the absolute condition of the conventional narrative definition. She was also important for being a direct reference to experimental theatre directors such as Robert Wilson, Heiner Goebbels, Judith Malina, and Richard Foreman.

Gertrude Stein, as a playwright, wrote without excluding language and text, yet she undermined the dramatic conventions of Western theatre explicitly. The anti-textuality of the Historical Avant-garde is undoubtedly an attitude towards a dramatic tradition that believed in the possibility of representation. Gertrude Stein completely ignored the representational basis of dramatic convention, shattered the narrative, disintegrated the dramatic convention’s past tense oriented time order, and questioned the notion of composing a scene in the naturalist sense by proposing a concept of “landscape text”. Therefore, it would be wrong to consider her plays from the category of closet drama and say that these plays do not suggest a new theatrical aesthetic. It was precisely for this reason that Gertrude Stein was an important figure for the new avant-garde theatre aesthetics after the 1970s, fed by the historical avant-garde. She reconsiders language notion without rejecting it, which was also a phenomenological question in her plays. The aim of this study, was to grasp the textuality understanding of postdramatic theatre. The study examined Gertrude Stein’s anti-narrative strategies such as “the essence of what happened” exploratory, “landscape text” concept and phenomenological approach using examples from her plays.