From 1932 onwards, she had begun to rediscover and reintegrate stories into her dramatic writing, an element hitherto she had worked to exclude.
"[1] Despite her newfound use for narrative, Stein did not, as scholar Betsy Alayne Ryan states, "leap foolishly into ordinary comprehensibility.
The play adopts a number of textual strategies that presuppose a relationship to performance, though it is performance conceived in a distinctly modernist way: as spatial meaning (like Artaud's mise en scène or Brecht's Gestus), self-referential (as Beckett's work increasingly became or as in Brechtian quotation), and unconstrained by any adherence to the conventions associated with traditional dramatic literature (from which each of these practitioners have displayed varying degrees of independence).
Like Beckett, Stein is interested in an aesthetic of surfaces - of formal elements interacting in space - which do not serve the traditional purpose of the imitation of action.
The piece opens with Faustus (his precise name shifts and alters throughout the piece) looking out from the doorway to his study, which streams with intense white light from beyond, when Mephisto appears: Despite this opening, Stein proceeds to marginalize the Faustian struggle between good and evil within the breast of Man, which is traditionally played out through the relation between Faustus and Mephistopheles, in favour of a conflict (if the play can be said to have a dramatic conflict in the traditional sense of the word) between Faustus and "Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel."