Virginia Woolf’s importance as a novelist is well known. What draws you to write of her relationship to the theater? What new light will your study shed on her legacy as a writer?

For me, the theater came first and Woolf followed. I began my career as a scholar of modern Irish literature – Yeats in particular. Although I was first interested in his early poetry and prose, I later began studying writing about his plays and his work in theater. Eventually my interest moved to contemporary theater. I had written a paper on Eugene O’Neill and then three studies of Sam Shepard just before a sabbatical leave in London. While in London I became interested in new plays by British women. In addition to seeing plays by Lavery, Churchill, and Sarah Kane, I saw a marvelous adaptation of Orlando by Fervered Sleep Company. I began to plan a book on contemporary British women playwrights. When these playwrights were asked about who had most influenced them, they invariably mentioned Woolf’s novels and her long essay A Room of One’s Own. At the time, I was reading reception theorists such as Hans Robert Jauss, Keir Elam, Herbert Blau, and Patrice Pavis, and felt that my approach to these playwrights would be through Reception Theory. All of this led me back to my favorite novel, Woolf’s Between the Acts – which is all about audience reception. To shorten what is becoming an inordinately long response to your question, what was meant to be an entry point for my study of contemporary women playwrights became my focus. After returning from sabbatical, I presented a paper outlining Woolf’s legacy to contemporary British women playwrights at a Woolf conference. The response to this paper led to a few published articles including a long essay on Woolf’s theatrical theory in Women’s Studies. By then I was hooked, and my work became more and more focused on Woolf’s own experiences with theater and the role drama and theater played in her work. Although other studies have acknowledged the “dramatic” in Woolf’s novels, my book traces theater Woolf actually saw, what she wrote into her novels. Although Freshwater is Woolf’s only complete play, Between the Acts is as much play as novel and is one of the most revealing studies of theater audience ever written.

You mention that Woolf’s work has inspired many contemporary playwrights such as Caryl Churchill, Bryony Lavery, and Pam Gems. What is Woolf’s presence in today’s theater.

This is fascinating. As I mentioned earlier, all of these playwrights acknowledge a debt to Woolf. Often, though, they are thinking of Woolf as the mother of modern feminism rather than Woolf as a theater theorist or practitioner. But Woolf’s presence is not always abstract or behind the scenes. She and her works are more and more finding their way onto the stage. In other words, Woolf has become an actual stage presence. Who hasn’t seen Eileen Atkins as Woolf in A Room of One’s Own or in her Vita and Virginia, which has been revived dozens of times by Atkins and others? Earlier Woolf was the main character in Maureen Duffy’s A Nightingale in Bloomsbury Square and in Edna O’Brian’s Virginia. Every year there are new theatrical adaptations of To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Orlando, Mrs. Dalloway, as well as Freshwater. It’s only a matter of time before some playwright, producer, and director are brave enough to do a stage adaptation of Between the Acts. Let’s hope they stage it out of doors.

In her novels, Woolf focused on internal experience. How did she adapt this authorial concern to the needs of theater?

She didn’t. Freshwater, her only play, is broad comedy – in fact, a farce. It is all action; in Woolf’s own words, it is “buelesque,” “purely a family joke.” This is the problem all theatrical adapters of Woolf’s work face – how to deal with internal experience on stage. I examine a great many attempts at staging Woolf’s letters, diaries, and novels. Usually attempts employing Realism fail miserably. Some of the most successful adaptations have used dance, opera, radio, and multi-medial techniques to convey the internality. I have argued that Woolf’s many theater reviews, her essays on opera, her discussions of the disconnect between her own reading of plays and her experiences as theater spectator, as well as her depiction of audience response in Between the Acts can provide adapters with the theoretical foundations for successfully adapting internal monologue for the stage. But I have to add that we should not fall into the old trap of thinking of Woolf’s narrative as “stream of consciousness.” She is also an absolute master of dialogue. In her letters and diaries she is always writing mini-plays, satirically reproducing heard dialogue. This was all practice for creating play-like dialogue in the novels – particularly in Orlando, The Years, and Between the Acts. In some cases an adapter could simply transfer this dialogue from page to stage.

What effect would you like your book to have on Woolf studies?

I have to admit that I find it difficult to boast about my work. Too much blood, sweat, and tears went into it for that. Honestly, I hope that readers will see just how integral Woolf’s experiences as theater audience were to all of her work. Woolf herself is one of literature’s most famous readers. She collected so many of her essays in volumes titled The Common Reader, her characters read, her friends read, she is always envisioning the “ideal reader” of her own novels. Yet Woolf was also an inveterate theater-goer. She went to pantomimes, musical theater, and extravaganzas as a child (taking her nephews and nieces when they were children), she had season tickets to the opera, she saw production after production of Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen, and Shaw and so many others. More than most theater audience members, she was always aware of the difference between seeing (and hearing) plays and reading them. I hope that my book will influence Woolf readers to see her as a master of dialogue as well as of internal monologue. I also hope that my work will inspire more playwrights, adapters, directors, and producers to continue to bring Woolf’s work to the stage and to introduce her to theater audiences as well as to readers.

–Kathleen Shultz