CHICAGO (AP) – The actors were getting tongue tied as they struggled to learn the lyrics of a new musical about writer Gertrude Stein. One by one, they stumbled and stuttered over lines drawn from Stein’s own idiosyncratic works: “And to in and in and six and another.”

But director Frank Galati and composer Stephen Flaherty have experience in tackling tough material. After all, they helped turn E.L. Doctorow’s sprawling novel Ragtime into a Tony Award-winning musical in 1998.

Now they’ve teamed up for Loving Repeating: A Musical of Gertrude Stein, which opened Feb. 14 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago for a limited engagement through March 12.

Stein’s writings, Galati told the actors in the rehearsal room, are abstract, playful and repetitive, “like taking a sentence and cutting it up and throwing it in the air.” He reassured them that their effort will pay off with an audience amazed at their verbal mastery.

“It can have the grace of a soft shoe, like scat singing. So it has that bubbling improvisational quality,” said Galati, who often nods his head and smiles beatifically during rehearsal.

The “chamber musical” – with a cast of eight, plus five musicians – uses selected writings of the American expatriate writer who declared a “rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” and coined the term “lost generation” for those who came of age between World War I and World War II.

Stein is perhaps best known for nurturing and drawing to her Paris salon a celebrated circle of artists, writers and thinkers, including Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway and T.S. Eliot. But the show’s focus is on her passion for life and language and her decades-long relationship with Alice B. Toklas.

Galati is a fixture in the Chicago theater scene and won two Tonys for directing and adapting Steppenwolf Theatre’s production of The Grapes of Wrath on Broadway in 1990.

But his admiration of Stein’s work dates back much farther – to graduate school at Northwestern University – and he’s staged several other pieces created or inspired by her.

Galati shared his idea for a musical using Stein’s own texts with Flaherty during Ragtime, and they presented a version of Loving Repeating in 2003 at Northwestern using a mostly student cast.

Galati and Flaherty since have worked to give the story a more traditional arc, adding material to illuminate how Stein – like any artist – struggled with creative doubts, despite her famous confidence.

The framing device for the musical is a lecture Stein delivered in 1934 at age 60 at the University of Chicago. The set is based on a Picasso design for a Spanish ballet.

“It’s a very glancing trip down memory lane. It doesn’t tag specific narrative events in her life. It kind of glides in memory musically into the past,” Galati said.

“We’re telling the story of the relationship between Gertrude and Alice through the stories that Gertrude wrote, the lectures and essays she composed about writing, entries in journals, letters, poetry, prose and drama. … We’re drawing from all of these modes to kind of sketch the story of their relationship.”

Flaherty acknowledges that he was initially nervous about the Stein project. He usually collaborates with lyricist Lynn Ahrens, but this time he had to work with the often highly abstract text of a dead writer. Besides Ragtime, he and Ahrens have written the scores for such musicals as Once on This Island and Seussical.

“I found the language incredibly challenging. … It does have a logic, but it’s its own logic,” Flaherty said. “I found the more I submerged myself in the language, I would get lost for hours at a time writing the music.”

The composer said that eventually he drew inspiration from the way Stein played with language. The result is a score that incorporates elements of pop music, opera, jazz and vaudeville songs, with some musical themes echoing throughout the production.

Of the eight cast members, three are repeating their roles from the Northwestern production – Jenny Powers as Alice B. Toklas, Christine Mild as the young Gertrude Stein and veteran Chicago actress Cindy Gold as the older Gertrude Stein looking back on her life.

Gold said she often is cast as the “batty, funny” character in plays, and so she welcomed the chance to portray such a complex woman – even if Gold’s dyslexia makes the lyrics a special challenge.

She believes the audience will love the “tight rope” quality of the cast members singing the tricky lyrics. And she believes the format will make Stein’s poetry and prose easier to digest.

“The music illuminates the meaning,” Gold said. “[The show] is not Gertrude Stein the inaccessible. This is Gertrude Stein, the very accessible, the very human, the very funny.”

The Museum of Contemporary Art’s co-producer for the show is About Face Theatre, which focuses on plays that address issues of gender and sexual identity.

The MCA provided free rehearsal and theater space and marketed About Face’s first public presentation of I Am My Own Wife. Another challenging production, the true story of a German transvestite who survived Nazi and Communist regimes eventually went to New York, where it won a Tony Award for best play and the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for drama.

There are no current plans for Loving Repeating to be performed outside Chicago, although Galati and Flaherty said they would like Loving Repeating to be seen by a wider audience. However, they don’t believe the musical would need to be bigger to be a success, even in a city like New York.

“No, no. It’s just what it wants to be in terms of scale,” Galati said.

Galati said because Stein always was viewed as an artist ahead of her time, it’s appropriate that the musical is being performed at a contemporary art museum.

“There’s still tremendous interest in Gertrude Stein as a historical figure, as a famous person, as a lesbian, a Jew, an exile, a woman, an American, an expatriate,” Galati said. “All these facets of her personality put her in the margin of mainstream culture, and there is now finally a great interest in these marginalized communities and identities.”