Prelude: The Life and Work of Katherine Mansfield
In a journal entry near the end of her brief life, Katherine Mansfield wrote, “Take the case of K.M. She has led, ever since she can remember, a very typically false life. Yet, through it all, there have been moments, instants, gleams, when she felt the possibility of something quite other.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Crawford’s script does suffer from excess, however. At nearly three hours with two intermissions, the show provides a deluge of names and fleeting impressions of Mansfield’s lovers, publishers, friends, and family. Many of the nuances and shifts in her life dramatized here probably won’t resonate with someone who hasn’t recently immersed herself in Mansfield’s work and biography (Crawford draws heavily on Antony Alpers’s well-respected The Life of Katherine Mansfield as well as original sources such as her letters and journals). And yet there’s the occasional surprising omission.
In Mazurek’s staging a large white scrim is suspended at the rear of the stage, behind which shadowy figures from Mansfield’s life haunt her imagination and memory. This device is overused but sometimes effective, working best in the scenes between Mansfield and her overbearing parents. After Mansfield’s one-day marriage to George Bowden in 1909 (she left him on their wedding night and subsequently became pregnant by Garnet Trowell, a suitor her family had earlier deemed inappropriate), her mother sails from New Zealand to England to inform Mansfield that she must take herself off to a Bavarian “rest spa.” Here the comically grotesque figure of the mother looms large over the frightened, downhearted young Mansfield.
Crawford often incorporates Mansfield’s writing in the script and creates an alter ego, based on the young Mansfield in “Prelude,” named Kezia (sounds like “desire”). But the device of having Kezia recite sections from the stories wears thin, and Jessica Dunton’s occasionally uncertain enunciation causes us to miss some of the poetry in these passages. Several cast members play multiple roles, sometimes very well. Fischer shines as a grieving man torturing an insect in “The Fly,” and Karsnick brings comic buffoonery to a smug German matron in a scene from the 1911 “Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding” (which chillingly foreshadows Germany’s aggression).
