A Crowded House
by Kerry Reid
The audience moves from room to room, visiting scenes from the life and literature of Virginia Woolf in this brief, occasionally quite moving show by the State Theatre of Chicago. Nine vignettes combine snippets from Woolf’s novels with watershed biographical bits such as a party celebrating Virginia’s engagement to Leonard Woolf, her affair with Vita Sackville-West, and her final exit. A chatty Mrs. Dalloway (Catherine Bullard) serves as guide. Not all of Woolf’s Bloomsbury pals register in the fleeting glimpses we get of them. But Casey Searles brings an admirable blend of steeliness and vulnerability to Virginia herself, and the intimate settings are well suited for celebrating this lyrical chronicler of interior consciousness.
