Four Saints in Three Acts

Stage master David Greenspan applies his golden archness to an unusually challenging text: Gertrude Stein's cryptic modernist libretto for Four Saints in Three Acts, the avant-garde opera she wrote with the composer and music critic Virgil Thompson in the late 1920. (Sample passage: "in wed in dead wed lead in led wed dead in dead in led in wed in said in said wed led.") Under the guidance of director Ken Rus Schmoll (Middletown), Greenspan essays some 66 different roles, replacing Thompson's music with spoken cadences of his own.