BY KIM WILSON
As the lights come up on Walkabout Theater Company’s Prelude, The Life and Work of Katherine Mansfield, actor/playwright Loren Crawford stands alone amid giant chalk-drawn maps and phrases scrawled in precise girlish handwriting, speaking to the audience as if reciting from the counter-conventional, short-lived writer’s diary. Others join her to tell the story, appearing either as live participants or shadowy figures projected and distorted on a gauzy scrim–a visual interplay that creates a multidimensional effect on the Chopin Theater’s solid, flat stage. Although at this juncture, the production feels like a work-in-progress (even after some last-minute cuts, it lingers a bit too long and delves more broadly than deeply into its subject matter) there’s a riveting quality, that connection that makes an audience care, personally and deeply, about the people they’re watching.
That rare, almost spiritual feeling has been nearly impossible to define. Many have tried, describing one Walkabout production as being "like a poem…affecting in a way one is not quite sure of" and another as "something magic…onstage." With or without a label, that je ne sais quoi is attracting fiercely loyal artists and audiences to the enigmatic two-year-old collective.
"It’s hard to talk about," said frequent Walkabout director Stephan Mazurek. "(Playwright Federico Garcia) Lorca wrote this essay called 'The Duende Theory’ and it’s all about when a musician is playing and there comes a moment where you can’t see the musician anymore, that this passion takes over and you don’t know, 'Is the musician driving the music? Is the music driving it?’ I don’t think it has anything to do with technique. It has to do with whether a person is in touch with that inexplicable spirituality, and that is what interests me."
Serendipity and instinct have been common themes in the company’s evolution, starting with the chance meeting between artistic director Kristan Schmidt and Finnish actress Nina Sallinen that started the whole journey. "I actually met her husband first, in a restaurant," said Schmidt. "I had just come back from doing theatre in Belgium and I told him what a tremendous experience that was. He said that his wife was an actress and called her to come over. We just talked for hours about our aesthetics and ideas. It was 110 degrees in July and she was very pregnant–I’ve never seen anyone so pregnant. She actually gave birth that night." Very symbolic.
The two agreed to collaborate. Sallinen had been performing a monologue focused on an 80-year-old actress staging a farewell performance of King Lear in her home. Schmidt contributed her experiences as an ambulance worker helping the elderly. The result was Poor, Poor Lear, a commentary about loneliness and dignity in a grande dame’s final years that won praise for its poignancy and innovative staging.
"Though Poor, Poor Lear was low-tech, it was about the many perceptual languages that you can incorporate," said Schmidt. "What was important was the different types of sounds and the different spatial relationships to the audience (playing directly to them, playing behind them), as well as the different types of language. It starts out with language that’s very dense and Shakespearean, then unwinds to very small, almost TV style acting."
Poor, Poor Lear became not only a successful groundbreaking production, but a tool for recruiting kindred spirits. Rather than amassing an entire company at once through classified ads and cattle call auditions, Schmidt quietly and carefully cultivated her artistic team through personal, individual invitations. "Kristan has an interesting way of seeing someone and sensing a uniqueness about them, an individual voice, and inviting them to come to see a show," said Mazurek. "It sounds like a simple thing, but really it’s an incredible investment. If you like someone and you invite them to see what you do and to respond, you can tell whether they really want to be a part of it, since we’re doing unconventional things."
One of the first to accept the invitation was Crawford. " I saw Poor, Poor Lear and cried all the way home. There’s a line in it, about how art is something that you wrap up and give to the audience, that it’s a perfect little gift that you can package and present, and I thought 'That’s it,’ said Crawford. "I want to be a part of that. I want to work with people who understand that!"
Crawford, a Kentucky native and Northwestern University theatre graduate, impressed Schmidt and Sallinen at the Unified auditions with an original monologue entitled "Missing Memaw." Walkabout built a production around Crawford’s piece, adding to it an interpretation of Katherine Mansfield’s "The Canary," "Concert on Dulcimer" by Kentucky musician Nancy Johnson and an abstract visual piece entitled "The Book of Maybe," by Brian Jeffrey and Mazurek, Crawford’s long-time friend and collaborator, who would become the group’s newest member.
Mazurek, founder of the 15-year-old Itinerant Theater Guild and a director of photography with credits from VH1 Behind the Music, the History Channel, commercials and documentary films, is responsible for many of Walkabout’s stunning and powerful visual designs. "The interesting thing about thinking about theatre visually is that you can find ways to listen more acutely if the visual lands," said Mazurek. "All the shadow work I’m exploring in Prelude, all the projection and stage pictures, is to help to find a way to present the scene or moment in a way that will help you listen more deeply than you would if it were just flat. I’m just chasing visions–that’s all I do."
The journeying and vision chasing has brought its rewards–a growing band of likeminded, courageous, forward-thinking artists, an audience so faithful that the group knows many by name and, most recently, a Jeff nomination for the recent production of Disciple, a provocative new play about a chance encounter leading to a night of self discovery. It’s a premise that mirrors the Walkabout story brought together by fate but united by an ongoing process of creative exploration and invention.