In the author's notes for this new work, playwright Loren Crawford tells us that writer Doris Lessing led to her discovery of short story writer Katherine Mansfield. Lessing had written that Mansfield's journals were so startlingly intimate and so thoroughly modern that it felt as if they had just been laid down on the table by the author and that at any moment she might come back into the room and catch you reading it. Mansfield's short stories have a reputation for being some of the best in the English language. Virginia Woolf even confessed that Mansfield's writing was, " ... the only writing I have ever been jealous of."
That's why it's almost tragic that the playwright has chosen to obfuscate Mansfield's life and work with this almost unendurably tedious and pretentious piece. Mansfield was a master of her craft: she knew that communication, immediacy, and real storytelling values were what made her literary output sing. Loren Crawford, along with director Stephan Mazurek, has decided to appropriate the artist's life as an excuse for an embarrassingly shameless work, a conceit that is so self-indulgent and so self-consciously "arty" that it is certain to have any level-headed audience member rolling his or her eyes in disdain by the end of the play. That is, if they haven't already left or fallen asleep by the conclusion of its over three-hour course. Crawford has substituted distance for immediacy in Prelude, holding out her own literary preoccupation with Mansfield for us to examine rather than the life and work of the woman herself. Director Mazurek has made selections guaranteed to keep the audience confused and uninvolved, such as making a good portion of the action take place behind a scrim, where the actors are simply shadows instead of real people. This kind of artifice can work when it's used in moderation. When it's used to excess, as it is here, it just draws the desperation of its creators to be taken as "serious artists" to the fore.
The Australian accents ( especially that of Jessica Dunton, who, in the role of Mansfield's literary spirit, Kezia, sounds like she was schooled by Paul Hogan and then merited barely a passing grade ) along with the ham-handed, overblown performances by most of the cast also hold the audience firmly at a distance ... much of what's said is unintelligible.
However, Loren Crawford herself, who has chosen to take on the role of Katherine, is the one bright shining spot in the cast. Her performance is subdued, heartfelt, and moving. She brings Mansfield to glorious sympathetic life. The real shame is that the same cannot be said of her script. It's obvious that Crawford has a deep admiration, and maybe even love, for Mansfield. Unfortunately, little else is obvious because Crawford is unreasonable in her expectations of the audience's knowledge of the life and work of her subject. A timeline of Mansfield's life is included in the program, which I knew spelled trouble. A good script shouldn't require a scorecard. Crawford's script never leads us on the journey of discovery it should.
Walkabout Theater Company has, in its defense, made an admirable aim for art with Prelude, but they became so caught up in their own aesthetic that they forgot about communication. And that's the real shame.
