Abstract
From Feb. 16 to 19, the Brandeis Theater Company (BTC) will present “Ordinary Mind, Ordinary Day,” an original stage adaptation by theater professor Adrianne Krstansky and Abigail Killeen M.F.A. ’05 of four of Virginia Woolf’s early short stories. It follows Woolf’s characters in a quest beyond fact and reason – to the inner life beneath our days.
Woolf was steeped in depression and “kept in a dark room, drinking milk, only allowed to write for half an hour a day,” says Krstansky, noting her stories are also filled with humor, ecstasy and incantation. “I think if Virginia Woolf were alive today, she would be Patti Smith.”
The stories depict simple events, Krstansky says – a ride on a train, listening to a concert, a walk in a garden – but “it is how the imagination is sparked by the everyday that make these stories, to me, about a struggling of faith.”