
Nathan Lee Graham, Jo Lampert, Taylor Mac, TL Thompson, Janice Amaya, Rad Pereira, and Lisa Kron in Orlando. Photo: Julieta Cervantes
“My encounters with Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a queer classic, have been encounters with joy,” writes Sarah Ruhl, who originally created her stage adaptation of Orlando as a commission in 1998. Signature Theatre’s new production, directed by Will Davis, takes that joy seriously, leaning in to Orlando’s constant sense of self-discovery, into the text’s bawdiest possibilities for comedy, and–on a stage exposed to its bare brick walls, with an ensemble putting on characters and identities with every costume change–into the simple joy of making art in an ensemble. That joy of fellow-feeling and shared experience is, in some sense, a joy that the character of Orlando, rocketing through centuries of history between the ages of sixteen and thirty-six, with a gender switch midway, is denied in life. Orlando’s artistic ambitions are solitary: to complete a poem that he begins as a young man in the sixteenth century and finally completes as a woman in the twentieth. But Orlando’s expansive, fluid notion of identity seems to demand to be played out across the possibilities of a group, where no one is just one thing, one character, for very long, and where the “spirit of the age” does as much to define a person as do any of the individual qualities they may have been born with.
For both a revival and an adaptation of a form from another genre or another time to the modern stage, there’s always the question of why. Why bring this piece back now? Why translate one art form to another? I don’t know that Orlando entirely answers the “why translate” question: its picaresque, shaggy dog narrative seems ideally suited to the novel form, becoming here a hybrid of storytelling and enacting where the ensemble, including Orlando, narrates the action as much as inhabiting it. And simply moving through the centuries-long tale at enough speed to get it on the stage in an evening of reasonable length means stripping out a lot of the detail that makes the audience feel the way the spirit of a given age weighs upon Orlando. (Oana Botez’s costumes and wigs by Krystal Balleza & Will Vicari do solid world-building in this regard.) The scrappy, “let’s tell a story together” aesthetic here does seem to capture more of the tone of the original than other productions I’ve seen, both its lightly fantastical tripping through time and its tart attitude toward its hero(ine). Still, there’s a sense of so much of the same kind of thing happening to and around Orlando from era to era–falling in love and/or being fallen in love with; trying to complete a poem–that even the breakneck pace of events can feel narratively repetitive. As soon as we settle in to assess who Orlando is in a given place and time, time ratchets ahead again.
Still, the “why now” question presents itself so loud and clear that it stands as reason enough to revive the play. “Orlando was a man till the age of thirty, then she became a woman and has been one ever since.” It’s the matter-of-fact truth at the heart of the story—both remarkable and unremarkable, both a peculiar surprise to those who know Orlando (played by the writer, actor, and performance artist Taylor Mac) on both sides of the gender binary and a thing to be met with a shrug. The law and that looming “spirit of the age” have some hard truths for Orlando the woman, who makes it home to England from Constantinople to discover that she is the target of two separate lawsuits seeking to separate her from her property on the grounds of being either dead or female, neither of which entitles her to much. But outside of Orlando’s maid (Jo Lampert) greeting her on her return with “Milord! Milady! Milord! Milady!,” the transition is primarily remarked upon by a delighted suitor (Lisa Kron) who has some gender reveals of their own up their sleeve.
The meaning of gender is revealed to be as contingent as history, as much a matter of “the spirit of the age”: Orlando whirls through time and finds a place to land in all the centuries, an identity to claim. The world reacts to Orlando the striking young man differently than Orlando the unmarried youngish woman; the woman Orlando needs to learn a new manner of speaking and carrying herself in the world. Onboard a ship back to England, in conversation with the captain (TL Thompson), a perfect gentleman, Orlando must come to terms with “the penalties and privileges of her position” and we see her test in just one scene boundaries and sharp edges of her new existence. But Mac’s performance doesn’t shift the underlying fundamentals of Orlando’s character–shyness, literary ambitions, a yearning to be seen and understood by another–nor the wry knowingness with which Orlando-as-narrator describes their own life. Even in the moments where Orlando must confront the limitations her new gender places upon her, Mac never fails to recognize the absurdity in the whole endeavor nor to find the glee in Orlando’s discoveries in each new phase of life.
In 2010, when I first saw Orlando, with the central role played by a woman actor, it read as a gentle piece of fantasy, an enjoyable confection with relatively low stakes. Now, of course, the very idea of the complexity of gender is a national flashpoint, one that puts the life and safety of trans and other gender-nonconforming people at risk. And the company here by their sheer existence points to an expansive embrace of the possibilities of gender and the performative nature of identity. Director Davis, himself trans, describes his cast as “performers with distinct relationships to and journeys with gender.”
Beginning in contemporary rehearsal clothes with just a touch of sparkle, each puts on and takes off character–gender, age, identity–with their costume layers over their base. Botez’s costumes and Balleza and Vicari’s wigs are rich with color and just the right amount of historical detail: a towering headpiece and brocade for Lisa Kron’s archduchess, and an even more ridiculous headpiece for the archduke; a crown and layers of gold lace for Nathan Lee Graham’s Queen Elizabeth; furs for Janice Amaya’s Russian princess. Orlando, too, goes full tilt with the fashions of each era, from brocade tunic and tights to enveloping Victorian silks to a muted flapper ensemble with a stylish bob. (As Woolf says and Ruhl paraphrases, “Vain trifles as they seem, clothes … change our view of the world and the world’s view of us. In fact, there is much to support the view that it is the clothes that wear us and not we them;…they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues.”)
And in the world of Orlando, not only Orlando lives at the intersection of gender and society. Orlando’s various lovers and patrons, too, more often than not fall in between: Queen Elizabeth I (the marvelously imperious Graham), the “virgin queen” who ruled with the power of a man. The Archduchess/Archduke (Kron, delightfully oblivious to Orlando’s attempts to dispense with this suitor in all genders), who, a la Shakespeare, disguises herself to get close to a beloved. The Russian princess Sasha (Amaya), whom upon first encounter, Orlando believes to be a boy. Orlando’s nineteenth-century husband Marmaduke (Rad Pereira), with whom she shares a moment of simultaneous gender doubt.
Cross-gender casting is baked into the history of English-language theater (and Orlando includes a scene from As You Like It, one of the many Shakespeare plays that in their original form would have included male actors playing female characters in disguise as men), as is doubling of roles in a way that underscores the non-literal nature of theater acting. But once you’ve started from a spirit of play, and a group who actively ripples the gender binary, then add a constant swirl of costumes, identities, genders, centuries, you move from a symmetrical idea of gender swaps to a kind of joyful disruption of the very idea of a literal and fixed definition of gender. What else, after all, is being an actor–but in the world of Orlando, what else, after all, is being a person? New York theatergoers are perhaps not the audience who most needs to hear Orlando’s message, to embrace its plurality, but the piece certainly feels timely in a way that Virginia Woolf, or even the Sarah Ruhl who wrote it twenty-five years ago, could not have predicted.