Theatre Smith-Gilmour’s transition from Anton Chekhov to Katherine Mansfield is in many respects a natural one. Mansfield, one of the great innovators of the modern short story, was tremendously influenced by Chekhov, whose prose Michelle Smith and Dean Gilmour have been successfully adapting for the stage for the past eight years (Chekhov’s Shorts, Chekhov Longs…In the Ravine, Chekhov’s Heartache). And both Chekhov and Mansfield write about the bourgeoisie, whom they characterize in simultaneously tragic and absurd terms.

“They’re talking about wasted lives — about the urgency not to waste your life,” says Gilmour. “Both were obsessed with that, really. And both died young, of tuberculosis.”

Despite these similarities, Gilmour feels his company has turned over a new, exciting leaf with Mansfield. The Mansfield Project — which teams Gilmour and Smith with Claire Calnan and Adam Paolozza, who previously worked with the company for Chekhov’s Heartache — adapts four of the author’s short stories, all of which, with their deliberate stolidity and indeterminacy, are much harder to imagine as straight-ahead theatre than Chekhov’s.

“Mansfield is quoted as saying that she didn’t want to have a style that was her style: that the form would grow out of the story, and that the story would dictate where the form went,” says Gilmour. “It’s writing that doesn’t have dramatic action at its core. And so we’ve focused on the actors, on their abilities to transform and be the story. It took us to a place where we were having great debates about through lines. We were reading characters microscopically, considering how to create images. It had a surreal feeling at times — of focusing on moments of great revelation, explosion and change inside these characters’ lives.”

Interestingly, Gilmour makes Mansfield’s style sound like that of Chekhov’s difficult major plays, which he and Smith have more or less avoided thus far. (Their mandate, building on their training in the 1970s with Jacques Lecoq, is transposition.) He grants that audiences are bound to notice further parallels: the Three Sisters–esque “Daughters of the Late Colonel” is about two spinsters fussing over the aftermath of their father’s funeral; and “Prelude” is about a family moving to a country house, a sort of Cherry Orchard in reverse.

Still, Gilmour stresses the variations. “Something we’ve always said about Chekhov is that we adore his unsentimental outlook,” he says. “Mansfield can be scathing, but she is not quite as unsentimental, perhaps because she’s talking about women and their experiences in a different, more personal way than Chekhov.”

Gender is indeed a big part of it, and has, of course, informed Mansfield’s canonization in a way that it hasn’t Chekhov’s. (English students often unfairly deride her as an ersatz Virginia Woolf.) Gilmour points out that, even though both died young, Chekhov had an extra nine years on Mansfield. “At her best she really has given us something precious,” he says. “At her most unfinished she gives us a great challenge for the stage. She dangles out there as something to be discovered.”