• 1 Edna Kenton, review of Lima Beans, qtd. in Murphy, Brenda, The Provincetown Players and the Culture (...)

Here was a clear case of what fine synthesis an experimental stage could give when a poet wrote, when poets spoke and when a poet–painter painted.1

• 2 See The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry.
• 3 The Arensberg circle, sponsored by collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg, also included Kreymborg (...)
• 4 “Marriage Boxes” is the title of a section in Loy’s poem “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose.” Although th (...)

2This article focuses on the idea of a collaboration across the arts between the two poets and Zorach, a poet-artist, as amateur actors with Kreymborg, who was also a poet himself, as well as the editor of the magazine that brought their work to prominence. As Suzanne Churchill has argued, Others was highly influential in creating a space for experimentation in American poetry,2 and little magazines like Others “served as stages for experimental literary productions […] as experimental performance spaces, more similar to theaters than to books” (2017 n. p.). In the light of this statement, it is surprising that the possible intertextual and intermedial connections between the work that appeared in Others and this performance that involved the little magazine’s leading figures have remained unexplored. Furthermore, while other studies focusing on the related and partially overlapping Arensberg circle have emphasized the strategic importance of community and improvisational collaborative practices, as well as the productive exchanges between the arts,3 this case of modernist theater collaboration between poets is often omitted or briefly mentioned in passing as a simple amusing anecdote. While theater, unlike poetry or painting, is by definition a collaborative art, I argue that this case of modernist theater collaboration is unique in the far-reaching relationships between the page and the stage, and between the different arts, that it created. Lima Beans gains in importance when examined alongside the poems of Loy and Williams that appeared in Others in this period. I begin by examining the production’s innovative, experimental aesthetics, which goes against the grain of the realist theater favored by the Provincetown Players. I show that the play strategically engages with and parodies this tradition through a certain number of abstract, proto-absurdist or de-naturalizing elements, thus subtly navigating between various conflicting strands of European and American avant-garde. I then focus on Kreymborg’s attempt to create a unique interarts synthesis, bridging the gap between arts as varied as drama, poetry, puppet theater, music, dance, and pantomime in his “puppet plays.” This blurring of generic boundaries, it is worth mentioning, was reinforced in the case of the production of Lima Beans by the strategic casting of key players of the nascent American poetic modernism in the main parts, and by Kreymborg’s own overlapping roles as the editor of Others on the one hand and as the “Wire-Puller” (Loy, 1997 55) of the puppet-characters of Lima Beans on the other. Finally, focusing on the intertextual dialogues between the play and the poems of Loy and Williams published in Others in this period, I explore the ironic blurring of the play’s proto-absurdist characters with the poets’ textual personae: the Futurist sets designed by Zorach specifically alluded to Loy’s experience with the Italian Futurists in Florence, while the quotidian dialogues between husband and wife read as a reference to the feminist deconstruction of “marriage boxes”4 in her early poems, even as they engaged with William Carlos Williams’s modernist poetics centered on the everyday.

• 5 Lima Beans also applies the principle of “hilarity in dialogue, the negative act, the reechoing one (...)

5If on one level the plot of the play may seem like a half-hearted attempt to abide by the rules of realist family dramas—a domestic setting, a family conflict, a bland, unembellished, everyday dialogue—, in order to be accepted by the Players, on another level it reads as a parody of such conventions. The characters, lacking names, listed simply as “She,” “The Wife,” and “He” and “The Husband” respectively, and sometimes referred to as Mr. and Mrs. Lima by Kreymborg in his memoirs, are obviously flat characters, embodiments of stereotypical gender roles, and deprived of any kind of psychological depth, complexity, or motivation. The plot takes the somewhat fatuous rituals of domesticity and married life to the point of absurdity: the loving “Wife” decides to give her husband a break from their regular meal of lima beans, which they have been having every night, opting for string beans instead; she then greets her husband who has just come back from work; upon seeing the string beans her husband throws a fit of violent anger for no apparent reason, throwing them out of the window; she hastily buys the habitual lima beans from the huckster and a scene of rather mawkish reconciliation between the two concludes the play. At regular intervals, the couple perform their ritual of embracing and kissing each other “daintily six times” (Kreymborg, 1918 47, 58). A multitude of elements combine to break with the illusion of mimesis that realist theater relies on and to create an effect of estrangement rather than identification with the story of this domestic drama. The omnipresent comedy of repetition, the nonsensical dialogues, or the fact that the vegetable-festooned curtain is listed as a member of the cast are all essentially proto-absurdist techniques, whose lineage may be traced back to Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896), with its puppet characters and cardboard sets, and which anticipate the techniques of much later absurdist plays like Eugène Ionesco’s La cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano 1950). While the geometric black-and-white checkerboard sets could be seen as a realistic element, vaguely creating the illusion of a domestic space like a kitchen, on another level they clearly engage with the non-representational aesthetics of the most innovative European avant-garde currents—Futurism and Cubism. In fact, they strikingly resemble the sets of Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s Thaïs (1917), the only surviving Futurist film. Designed by the Italian painter and scenographer Enrico Prampolini, the scenery of Thaïs created a similar stark contrast between black and white geometrical elements, providing an abstract backdrop to a less Futurist diegesis. In manifestos like “The Variety Theater” (1913) and “The Futurist Synthetic Theater” (1915), Marinetti and his fellow Futurists had violently attacked the principles of realism and verisimilitude that characterized traditional theater. In his 1915 manifesto “Futurist Set Design,” Prampolini specifically called for the use of sets breaking the illusion of mimesis: “The stage is not a photographic enlargement of a rectangle of reality, nor even a relative synthesis of it; it is the replacement of reality with a theoretical and material system of subjective stage design, as distinct from the ostensibly objective scenography of today. […] To conceive of the stage in itself, as a pictorial fact, is wrong” (Prampolini 212-213). Although Loy’s own Futurist plays like “Collision” and “Cittàbapini” are more in line with the principle of experimental simultaneity Marinetti advocated, Kreymborg’s play also seeks to attack the principle of theatrical realism.5

• 6 In 1921, Craig published a chapbook titled Puppets and Poets, which provided the inspiration for th (...)
• 7 Gordon Craig’s Burmese puppet collection is available online on Gallica.

6Rather than favoring realist acting techniques that would remain popular in American theater and eventually culminate in the Method Acting tradition, Kreymborg also wanted Loy and Williams to perform like two puppets, engaging with the innovative acting techniques developed by Gordon Craig, whose experiments also went against the grain of naturalism and sought to foreground the idea of art as artifice. Craig’s texts like “The Actor and the Über-Marionette” (1908), where he developed his theory of the actor as a super-puppet, and his plays for puppets, published in the collection Drama for Fools, were important influences to Kreymborg’s series of puppet plays.6 Craig wrote the preface to the 1923 edition of Kreymborg’s Puppet Plays. All of these visual allusions to the aesthetics of the Futurists and Gordon Craig, whom Loy had known in Florence, also serve as oblique references to Loy’s extravagant, cosmopolitan life, radically at odds with the mundane domesticity of her character. Thus, they further break the illusion of realism, making the work of the Provincetown Players seem conventional by comparison. Finally, the play is typically avant-garde in its turn to non-Western artistic practices to create an estrangement from the familiar; in the opening stage direction of Lima Beans, Kreymborg suggests: “Pantomime is modestly indulged by husband and wife, suggesting an inoffensive parody, unless the author errs, of the contours of certain ancient Burmese dances” (1918 43). Although Kreymborg himself was probably only vaguely familiar with what Burmese dance theater looked like, and this reference may be seen as typical of the early-twentieth-century Western trend for exoticism and Orientalist appropriation, Craig arguably had a higher degree of knowledge of Eastern puppets and acting traditions. In his chapbook Puppets and Poets, he dwells on the differences between puppets from various countries, including “Burmah.” The chapbook also features an elaborate diagram of how a Japanese puppet is constructed. He also owned a collection of Burmese puppets,7 one of which has a costume strikingly resembling Mrs. Lima’s [Ill. 2].

• 8 Bay-Cheng and Cole’s anthology includes plays by Williams and other writers who moved in Kreymborg’ (...)

11It is important to note that he makes an explicit parallel between his plays and his 1916 “Book of Free Forms” Mushrooms, which is usually classified as a free-verse poetry collection. In this preface as well as in Troubadour, he suggests that these “free forms,” which often include dialogue, may be seen not only as poems but also as “the nucleus of a new type of playwriting” (1925 174). Interestingly, to any reader familiar with the principles of modernist poetic techniques, Kreymborg’s insistence that when delivering the lines, actors should “adhere to the sense connotation” rather than mechanically scanning the rhythm of the lines, reads as an allusion to Pound’s famous Imagist dictum “As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome” (Pound 3). In Lima Beans, Kreymborg brought Pound’s observations about the difference between the “sequence of the musical phrase” and the “sequence of a metronome” to a curiously literal dimension: in Troubadour, he remembers that he began rehearsals “by taking out a pencil and beating time while Mina and Bill read their lines” (1925 309). Murphy observes that since “Kreymborg had unorthodox ideas about the acting style he wanted, [Loy’s and Williams’s] lack of theatrical training was as much of a bonus as their understanding of the free-verse line and how to read it” (106-107). In other words, they were supposed to deliver their lines as poets, not as actors. Indeed, while this experimental attempt to create an interarts synthesis is at the core of the whole series of plays, Kreymborg’s strategic casting of two of the most innovative modernist poets in the main parts of Lima Beans was particularly instrumental in reinforcing the idea of the play as a free-verse poem, creating a deliberate and meaningful blurring of roles. While casting poets in the main parts was a relatively rare practice, Lima Beans is clearly inscribed in a tradition of modernist intermedial experiment that Sarah Bay-Cheng and Barbara Cole call “modernist poetic drama” (13), an “attempt to resolve the division between poetry as literature and theater as performance” (14).8 Although Kreymborg’s act of orchestrating the performance with his baton was not included in the show per se, one may see in this invisible metronome a clin d’œil not only to Kreymborg’s own role as the editor of Others but also to Pound’s key role as a maître d’orchestre of the modernist movement. As Bay-Cheng and Cole argue, in such intermedial projects “the formal experimentation of the poetry [allowed modernists] to resist and subvert the apparent reality of the theater” (17). Unlike European avant-gardes like Dada and Futurism which drew on the confrontational aspects of theater, “American poets attempted to explore the communal aspects of the theater to engage a new audience for poetry” (Bay-Cheng and Cole 19). Thus, one of the key achievements of Lima Beans was to foster a community spanning both the page and the stage, allowing for far-reaching collaborative practices. Therefore, the play invites readings alongside the poetry that appeared on the pages of Others: the apparently light and amusing story of the play gains in importance when read in dialogue with Loy’s and Williams’s poems that appeared in Others in this period.

• 9 See “Collision” and “Cittàbapini,” published in Rogue in 1915. Suzanne Churchill also points out th (...)
• 10 It is tempting to speculate that Loy may have modelled her costume on the Burmese puppet of a princ (...)

13Casting Loy as the wife may at a first glance seem something of a mismatch, and no one was more aware of this than Kreymborg himself, who observed that the part was “much too light for a person of Mina’s worldly experience” (1925 309). Elsewhere, he had eloquently described her mythic reputation of an “exotic and beautiful” poet famous for her “madly elliptical style scornful of the regulation grammar, syntax, and punctuation” (1929 488). The contrast is also stylistic: compared to Loy’s own baffling and daringly innovative poems, as well as to her highly experimental Futurist plays published in Rogue in 1915,9 the “poetry” of this free-verse play, strewn with occasional rhymes—looks ironically tame, domestic, and down-to-earth, foregrounding the contrast between Loy the poet and Loy “the Wife.” Paradoxically, in spite of Kreymborg’s insistence that the play’s dialogue must be read as free verse, there is a humorous musicality in the lines, which are often surprisingly metrical, as foregrounded by the use of dactylic feet (such as “wistfully whimsical” or “marriage is greater than love”). There is even a line that sounds like an iambic pentameter—“But what shall I give him to eat to-night?”—which seems to ironically sum up the Wife’s entire raison d’être. The play seems to align the lull of the humorous musicality of the lines with the ritualized conventions of marriage, creating an implicit contrast with the jarring rhythms and fragmented syntax of Loy’s poems. On the visual level, the sense of discrepancy between Loy and her character was further reinforced by her costume, a “fashionable décolleté gown” that she had designed herself, and which was markedly not “in keeping with Mrs. Lima” (1925 310) as Kreymborg observed. The costume, which consisted of “a green taffeta gown, gold slippers, and pieces from her jewelry collection, including a mosaic brooch, dangling gold earrings, and ornate English rings” (Murphy 107), introduced an exotic touch, strategically breaking with the illusion of realism and creating an estrangement effect from the banal domestic scene.10

• 11 Pound printed excerpts of the poem in two anthologies, under the title “The Ineffectual Marriage.” (...)
• 12 An equivalent of this may be found in the excessively mawkish sentimentality of Mr. and Mrs. Lima, (...)
• 13 This was nonetheless a condition also familiar to Loy, who experienced a long period of dissatisfac (...)

14Arguably, Kreymborg’s choice of having a worldly, highly sophisticated and cosmopolitan avant-garde female poet engage in a deliberately banal and insipid narrative of domesticity and marriage in order to create an estrangement effect of sorts owes something to the implicit theatricality of Loy’s own poem, “The Effectual Marriage / or / The Insipid Narrative / of / Gina and Miovanni” (ca. 1915). First published in Others: An Anthology of the New Verse (1917), it was later praised as a particularly outstanding example of modernist poetic technique by both Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.11 In this poem, Loy uses thinly veiled anagrams for the names of the protagonists, casting herself and Futurist Giovanni Papini, with whom she had a brief liaison in Florence, as husband and wife in a mocking representation of an “insipid” conventional marriage. Apart from being a transparent allusion to Papini’s name, “Miovanni” also conjures up the sentimental address amore mio,12 while “Gina” refers not only to Loy herself, but also functions as an embodiment of an essentialized female identity, reduced to the stereotypical gender roles of a spouse and housewife. Loy’s self-casting as “Gina” suggests that she understood gender as performance, long before it was theorized as such. As Churchill observes, the effect of the poem hinges to a great extent on the strategic aloofness of the position of the speaker—both author of the “narrative” and one of its main characters, critical subject and object of the satire: “Loy makes herself both author and butt of her own satire: she exists both inside and outside the poem, refusing to occupy a stable position as spectator or participant in the narrative” (2006 202). Loy’s costume in the play, clearly evocative of her reputation as a dazzling, emancipated, exotic and sophisticated female poet, but radically at odds with the domesticity of her stereotypical character, creates a similar effect of estrangement and aloofness from the story itself. As Laura Scuriatti observes, Loy was herself transformed into “the character ‘Mina Loy’” (72) in avant-garde circles, an incarnation of a quasi-mythic, dazzling, eccentric and emancipated “Modern Woman”—the exact opposite of both Gina and Mrs. Lima, a contrast which is implicitly present in both the poem and the play. Like Mrs. Lima, Gina spends her whole day in the kitchen, busying herself among pots and pans,13 and happily pondering on the greatness of marriage:

• 14 This interest in staging the architecture of married life is also evident in other, more realist Pr (...)
• 15 I want to thank the anonymous reviewer of this essay who pointed out that the correspondences betwe (...)

16As both Scuriatti and Churchill have argued, a focus on space as related to gender divisions and constraints predominates in “The Effectual Marriage”: “[the poem’s] structural principle is an architectural space—a house that both describes and prescribes the limits of a marital relationship” (Churchill, 2006 201). Kreymborg’s play has a similar focus on domestic spaces, which are essentially spaces of confinement for women, as the opening stage direction makes it clear: “The scene is a miniature dining room large enough to contain a small table, two chairs, a tiny sideboard, an open window, a closed door leading to the other rooms, and additional elbow space” (Kreymborg, 1918 43).14 While the husband freely goes in and out, the wife (both Gina and Mrs. Lima) is confined to the kitchen, as emphasized by the alliterations (“kitchen,” “kindly,” “kept”), a prisoner among her husband’s “pots and pans,” and may only use the “kitchen window” to manage the household by talking to the vegetable huckster. One may note that as in Loy’s poem, the play’s claustrophobic space is structured by a door and a window, and orchestrated by the husband’s comings and goings, as well as by the dealings with the huckster through the window: “Boundary areas such as windows and doors are endowed with the possibility of change and transformation, but they also simultaneously function as loci in which the ideological force of spatial structures is at its strongest” (Scuriatti 73). Although Kreymborg’s dissection of the politics of marriage and domestic spaces is less thorough than Loy’s, as the happy ending suggests, Loy’s poem and Kreymborg’s play can be read as a single, palimpsestic text15 deconstructing “marriage boxes,” with connections reinforced by Loy’s ironically aloof presence in both repressive spaces.

• 16 Williams celebrates these pleasures notably in later poems like “Child and Vegetables” and “This is (...)

17Loy’s poem is an acerbic, biting feminist satire, which targets the combined dimensions of Futurist misogyny, her own unhappy marriage of convenience to the painter Stephen Haweis after an unwanted pregnancy, and the particularly stifling and rigid gender roles of patriarchal societies like Italy where she was living at the time of the composition of the poem. In comparison, Kreymborg’s play tackles the same themes in a much more humorous, light-hearted and amusing manner, and its take on marriage and domesticity looks more inoffensive. This more blithe, playful, and amusing tone of the work, which is characteristic of Kreymborg’s style, perhaps also owes something to the fact that William Carlos Williams, rather than the misogynistic Papini, was cast in the role of the husband: Kreymborg thus invited spectators to read his performance alongside Williams’s textual poetics, and particularly the way it engages with the theme of the everyday, marriage and domesticity. For instance, the joyful litany of the Huckster amounts to a Williams-like paean to vegetables and fruit, celebrating the simple pleasures of food as a source of marital harmony and family bliss16:

• 17 See the chapters “Dr. Williams and Mr. Hyde” and “Love and Marriage” in Ahern’s William Carlos Will (...)
• 18 In his autobiography, Williams dwells on his infatuation with Loy: “I had a flirtation with Mina—fr (...)

21The poem hinges on a split between two figures that Barry Ahern eloquently calls “Dr. Williams and Mr. Hyde,”17 as both are alter egos of Williams himself. On the one hand, there is “the happy genius of my household,” the husband and father content with his middle-class, suburban existence, and on the other there is a figure that encapsulates everything that is suppressed and excluded in this ideal narrative of marital bliss and peaceful domesticity. The repetition of the pronoun “my” throughout the poem charts this split, which suggests that the husband both needs his wife and children and/as possessions (“my wife,” “my household”) and finds them insufficient, needing a space for the irrational impulses marriage excludes (“my north room,” “my mirror,” “my shirt round my head,” etc.). The poem provides a space in which these impulses may be “safely” played out in a conditional, i.e. imaginary modality (“If I”). The “grotesque” and homoerotic scene of the husband caught secretively and solipsistically engaging in the irrational act of admiring his naked body in the mirror, and feeling lonely in spite of all the happiness he is supposed to feel, vividly captures everything that is excluded from the narrative of domesticity and marriage. Lima Beans suggests as much when the husband gets upset for no apparent reason and leaves when seeing the string beans instead of his favourite lima beans, delivering a long nonsensical monologue and calling his wife a “Traitress” (Kreymborg, 1918 52). In that sense, the solipsistic, homoerotic scene of “Dance Russe” may be read as an addendum to the play: a soliloquy for Mr. Lima, it bridges the gap left by his unexpected exit, with the alternative space of the page providing an outlet for impulses that are excluded from the rational, heteronormative space of marriage, here aligned with the space of the stage. While Williams’s poems are often read as an unambiguous praise of peaceful, everyday life, this poem foregrounds the ambivalence towards marriage and domesticity that lies at the core of his poetry. It also alludes to Williams’s own “double life” as an exemplary doctor, husband and father who nonetheless often spent his evenings at the Arensbergs’s apartment or rehearsing Lima Beans in the company of Mina Loy rather than at home with his wife.18 The “Mrs. Lima” character in Kreymborg’s play—an incongruous combination between a submissive housewife and a seductive, dazzling beauty with a low-necked dress—captures this impossible duality.