theatrical aesthetics. Foreman himself has spoken about the significance of her writings to his work. In 1969, Foreman declared, "Gertrude Stein obviously was doing all kinds of things we haven't event caught up to yet." Kate Davy analyzes Stein's influence on Foreman in her article, Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theatre: The Influence of Gertrude Stein. The primary connection between the works of Stein and Foreman, she proposes, is the writers' conception of consciousness in writing. Stein preferred "entity writing" over "identity writing." According to Stein's model, "entity writing" is "the 'thing-in-itself' detached from time and association, while identity is the 'thing-in-relation,' time-bound, clinging in association." "Entity writing" is free from any notion of remembering, relationships, or narratives, and it expresses what Stein called the "continuous present." Stein's method of writing is meditative practice that requires the writer's "deliberate detachment of oneself from the external world while documenting one's own consciousness in the act of writing." Therefore, this type of writing is said to reflect the workings of the writer's mind in its presentation. Stein adopted this theory of the "continuous present" to her work as a playwright. She abandoned the theatrical conventions of narrative structure in favor of a theatrical experience that focuses on the real-time consciousness—one in which "the spectator can move 'out' of the composition, or stop, at any moment without creating syncopated emotional time." Foreman's theatrical experiences invoke Stein's theories in that they both abandon narrative, focusing on the here-and-now, and they seem to include Foreman's "process of making the play" in the presentation of the play. In his essay, "How I Write My (Self: Plays)," Foreman explains his process of taking text to performance: "The writing tending towards a more receptive, open, passive receiving of 'what wants to be written' and the staging tending towards more active organization of the 'arrived' elements of the writing -- finding ways to make the writing inhabit a constructed environment." Davy notes that like Stein, Foreman tends to avoid "'emotional traps' or the intentional manipulation of an audiences emotional responses by eliminating the 'lifelike' qualities of drama (clearly developing situation involving imaginary people in imaginary places), thereby creating a world into which the spectator has great difficulty projecting himself." Davy gives the example of Foreman's characters often referring to themselves in the third person, which creates an alienating effect for the audience member who cannot project themself into the experience of