The events of Gertrude Stein’s life do not make for particularly compelling drama. The privileged child of wealthy parents, supported her whole life by a stipend, Stein’s most frequent complaint was of boredom. But boredom is not the central concern of librettist Karren LaLonde Alenier’s new opera, “Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On.”

Telling the story of Stein’s artistic development, Ms. Alenier strains to find dramatic situations on which to pin her tale. She is forced to make the most of relatively minor conflicts – tensions between Gertrude and her brother Leo Stein or squabbles with her lover, Alice B. Toklas, during her 1935 lecture tour of the United States. Minor disagreements become cause for tempestuous grandstanding, all underscored by a refrain of “What makes a genius?”

The irony is that Stein herself provided the dramatic model par excellence for depicting such static situations. Stein was a genius at depicting the nonevent – the endless repetition of words and phrases, the conversation leading nowhere. Two examples of Stein’s writing for the stage, “Capital Capitals” and “Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters,” were presented along with Ms. Alenier’s treatment of Stein’s life story.

Though she is mostly remembered for her poetry and prose, Stein’s contributions to drama are substantial. She first encountered the stage as a child, when her parents took her to see a production of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” that toured California in the 1880s. It was the melodramatic showpiece of the era, and Stein was fascinated by the elaborate costumes and set-pieces.

She envisioned even then a kind of drama where one beautiful image would be repeated, unchanging, throughout. Later in life this would develop into what she termed “landscape drama.” Disregarding all rules of character development, dramatic conflict, or narrative progression, Stein composed plays and opera librettos in which wordplay was the central concern: A single phrase or idea would be reiterated with slight variations; characters served only to introduce new variations on the theme.

It proved, against all odds, to be a widely popular form. Her collaboration with composer Virgil Thomson, “Four Saints in Three Acts,” became a Broadway sensation in 1934, and avant-garde dramatists from Eugene Ionesco to Samuel Beckett built on her accomplishments.

The text of “Capital Capitals” was originally culled from demographic field reports and statistics, though amid the sequences of verb conjugations and spiraling non sequiturs little intelligible data remains. Virgil Thomson set the piece to music some four years after it was written, turning it into a parlor-room “conversation” among four aristocrats.

That this conversation is at all intelligible, let alone outrageously funny, is a testament to the precision and dedication with which director Nancy Rhodes and her cast have approached their task. Rather than let the opera become a purely abstract linguistic exercise, they grounded Stein’s nonsensical wordplay in a concrete language of gesture and intonation, crafting characters with distinct personalities and relationships. The effect of their efforts is to heighten Stein’s language games while giving us something of a storyline to follow.

This same approach yields further dividends in Stein’s “melodrama” “Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters,” composed as a stage play by Stein and set to music by Ned Rorem in 1968. Here the juvenile antics and verbal sparrings of five siblings playing a game of “murder” take on an irrepressible manic energy. The cast, led by Jody Sheinbaum and Justin Vickers, bring enormous talent to the piece, and Stein’s experiments emerge the better for their labors.

Stein’s life for the most part bore out the same kind of stasis as her art; this would seem to create a unique opportunity to apply the techniques of Stein’s drama to the conditions of her own life, but this is an opportunity missed by “Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On.” Instead, the contrived ups and downs of Ms. Alenier’s libretto, accentuated by William Banfield’s overly energetic jazz score, begin to resemble the very melodrama Stein meant to parody in “Three Sisters.” A compelling account of Stein’s artistic development remains to be written, but Stein seems to have already laid out the tools herself.