ABSTRACT
One might devote an essay merely to unpacking this statement for its historical, discursive, and sexual resonances. Let me just say that Toklas’ irritation seems justified. She is pointing to clouds; they have an ontological, referential status as clouds, but Stein playfully crosses ontology with textuality, object with symbol, referent with sign. Acting the self-conscious spectator, Stein produces a reading and says that that is more pleasurable than any Massachusetts clouds. I am concerned with how we point to and read signs in the theatre, and by “we” I mean feminist critics and theorists and also students of Brecht’s theatre theory-an unlikely group, but then this is part of my argument. I would suggest that feminist theory and Brechtian theory need to be read intertextually, for among the effects of such a reading are a recovery of the radical potential of the Brechtian critique and a discovery, for feminist theory, of the specificity of theatre.1
