Stella Stein is a road trip play about Stella Stein and Sam, two Americans driving through South Africa’s Drakensberg mountains. There's Heidegger and herpes, Coke and post-colonialism, seeing versus being and (not) identifying as "American." In the end it's a play about perspective; wanting, searching for and finally finding it - in the most unlikely of places.

Stella Stein has received developmental support from New Georges and Clubbed Thumb. Excerpts of the play have been presented as part of the New Georges Jamboree and Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks.

Conception

Stella Stein was initially conceived in response to Gertrude Stein’s essay on Plays. In it she expresses an interest in plays being a series of portraits, essences and, most especially, landscapes. She is not particularly interested in story -

Myself, I am very much interested in story. But I am also interested in portraits and landscapes and what roles they can play in the composition of story and character. And I am preoccupied by the notion of Perspective, particularly in light of our current socio-political realities. The limitations of the Western view so many of us were born into and the implications of living only with that view are subjects I find myself returning to incessantly.

And so Stella Stein was born, and embodies a search I believe many of us are already on, in one form or another.