It is early 1946.  The war is over. The world has changed.  But what will it look like for the American GIs in liberated France who now wait for their redeployment? In the war’s aftermath, they have time to contemplate the forces that have brought them here.  They know they are faced with urgent new questions, but they are unsure of what will save them.  And so, on the cusp of a new era, they talk and confront their fears.  From the question of race in America to the legacy of British imperialism and the rise of the American dollar, from industrialization and job-mindedness to the fading of critical judgment in the modern world, Stein’s GIs leave nothing unquestioned.

Brewsie and Willie, the lead characters, are accompanied by other men who are similarly awaiting their orders. They are often joined by two nurses — smart self-confident women who have their own analyses and questions to put to the self-taught philosopher, Brewsie, and his militantly practical young comrade in arms, Willie.  What they say is as addressed to our own moment as it was to theirs, more than 65 years ago.

At the end of her life, after enduring two world wars, and having transformed the future of both art and American literature, Gertrude Stein had a change of heart. The result was Brewsie and Willie, a novella whose publication she did not live to see.  War demanded realism, she said, and so, after decades of literary cubism, she returned to the ordinary speech of ordinary people and gave them the task of speaking and re-imagining the world.  The characters of her novella voice the ideas that Stein herself had expressed in her memoir, Wars I Have Seen. In this adaptation, Rosalind Morris remains true to Stein’s language while giving the characters the depth and texture of living men and women. Without the angst of Sartre’s No Exit, and beyond the absurdism of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Gertrude Stein’s Brewsie and Willie is a brave confrontation with the twentieth century, seen from amid the ashes of its near destruction. It is also a prescient anticipation of the twenty first century—all from the perspective of working class men and women for whom history is, as Brewsie says, a life and death question.