Gertrude's other woman.

Director Anne Bogart, long a leader of New York City's theatrical avant-garde, encounters a soul mate--Gertrude Stein

"I think Gertrude Stein is my mother," director Anne Bogart is fond of saying, "and Bertolt Brecht is my father." This offspring of two 20th-century geniuses might be better known if her spiritual parents were Walt Disney and Lucille Ball. But in the realms where she is known, which is any place theater equals "art" rather than "Broadway musicals," the 48-year-old Bogart is revered as one of the most innovative stage directors and influential acting teachers of her generation.

As a Columbia University theater professor and artistic director of the seven-year-old Saratoga International Theater Institute Company, Bogart has staged more than 70 productions of new plays and classics across the United States and abroad in the past 15 years.

Openly gay, she has staged works by lesbian playwright Paula Vogel (The Baltimore Waltz, Hot `n' Throbbing) and mounted theatrical portraits of iconic gay artists (Andy Warhol in Culture of Desire, Robert Wilson in Bob). Now she takes her closest look yet at lesbian love in Gertrude & Alice: A Likeness to Loving, a play about Stein and her lover Alice B. Toklas created and performed by Lola Pashalinski and Linda Chapman, playing through June 27 at the Signature Theatre in New York City.

"What draws me to the project is essentially Gertrude Stein," says Bogart. "I feel so influenced by the way she approached language--the use of a very small vocabulary with lots of repetition. What she did with words, I translate onstage with time and space."

The play circles around a critical moment in the relationship. "Alice found out that Gertrude had had an affair before they met that she never told her about," says Bogart. "This one hot point sent vibrations into the future and the past. Through this event we see their falling in love, their becoming a couple, Gertrude's work becoming a third party in the relationship, and then the discovery of a very hot and important relationship in Gertrude's life with someone named May Bookstaver. Alice was so vehement and so angry, Gertrude had to go back through her manuscripts and change every may to can. This is true! The jealousy was unbelievable."

The play itself emerged from a notable partnership. Pashalinski, who got her start with the late Charles Ludlam's legendary Ridiculous Theatrical Company, has worked with all the great avant-garde directors of our time (consider her the Judi Dench of off-off-Broadway). She has been lovers since 1980 with Chapman, who cofounded Dyke TV and works as associate artistic director at New York Theatre Workshop (the birthplace of Rent and a partner in many of SITI Company's productions).

The director says she's especially happy to be doing a play that addresses lesbian life in a nonlinear fashion. "I don't know if I could do something that's only about lesbian issues in a linear, mainstream way," she says. "I like more advanced aesthetics. I think the female aesthetic is essentially subversive." Certainly that's true of Bogart's artistic heroes. Besides Stein, she names French theater director Ariane Mnouchkine. "These are the people I look to for strength and inspiration in moments when I feel weak."

Shewey is the editor of Out Front Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Plays, published by Grove Press.

Find out more about Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and their world at www.advocate.com