The Brooklyn Rail

Midway through Orlando, the title character in Sarah Ruhl’s play becomes a woman while in Constantinople. This event feels fitting in a city that has gone through its own transformations; “Istanbul was Constantinople,” as the song goes, and, centuries before that, the now-Turkish city was a Greek one, Byzantium.

A person is not a city, and Orlando keeps her name; nonetheless, physical changes alter public perceptions. Orlando discovers the weight of this, in all its droll mundanities and stinging politics, throughout Ruhl’s play, based on Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography and now running at Signature Theatre in its first major New York production since 2010.

Across Ruhl’s decades-spanning career, genre shifts play to play but transformation persists as a key tenet. In The Clean House (2004), the fresh apples a maid bites and then casts off a balcony in her new home rot the instant they hit the floor of her old one, where her forlorn boss sits, lamenting her husband’s infidelity. In that play, death and life also converge: the boss’s husband cradles his new lover as she dies in his arms, but the maid, an orphan, sees something else. “This is how I imagine my parents,” she says. Suddenly, a tableau of death becomes one of her hilltop birth.

In Melancholy Play (2001), a woman is so mournful she turns into an almond, with no theatrics needed besides our imagination. And in For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday (2017), transformation is more straightforward but no less magical; warring and aging siblings put aside ideological differences to recapture their youth, donning green tights and pajamas to become Peter Pan and the Lost Boys. Even the family’s wizened, lumbering dog gets a bonnet: enter Nana.

Orlando (2003) is its own meditation on metamorphosis, and it’s Ruhl’s most direct engagement with gender fluidity. Featuring one performer as Orlando and an ensemble of discernible size to play every other part, Ruhl’s script suggests “as few as three gifted transformational virtuosic actors or as many as you can fit on a stage and pay.”

Will Davis’s production employs a Chorus of six queer performers; such a size not only creates a more playful ensemble but one that paints a more expansive portrait of gender. This wide embodiment of gender meets Woolf’s nearly-100-year-old text head-on and maximizes the source material’s intent: to not fully know but better interrogate who we are in relation to the bodies around us.

No performer can better pursue that intrigue than Taylor Mac, one of New York’s most celebrated gender-fluid performers. Already a time-hopper in A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, Mac now stars as Orlando, who similarly spans the centuries. A hopeful poet, Orlando begins Ruhl’s play as a young boy, a teenage page to Queen Elizabeth I; his first line is a spirited conviction of how the world sees him: “HE.” Without seeming to age, Orlando travels across Europe and into the 1900s. While in Constantinople, Orlando attends an enormous party and falls asleep for a week. On the seventh day, she awakes and is a woman.

Ruhl treats this seemingly mystical event without much ceremony; “Orlando had become a woman—there is no denying it,” the chorus says. “But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been."

Simultaneously, there is a quiet sacredness to Orlando’s transition. Its occurrence after a seven-day period suggests a biblical significance; God created the world in seven days. God, genderless, or omnigendered, exists in many states, none clearly defined. Orlando, too, exudes many shades of masculinity and femininity; her voice does not change, but to placate people’s expectations of womanhood, she does soften her voice, to comedic effect, in certain transactions.

Ruhl’s wry, buoyant writing lets Orlando express her gender, and others’ reactions to it, in exuberant, never harsh, ways. At one point, an archduke fails to woo Orlando and is unsure how to fill conversation silence.

“I shot an elk in Sweden,” he says.

“Was it a very big elk?” Orlando responds.

In many ways, Orlando is more sure of her gender, and herself, than those around her.

She understands that being an eighteenth-century woman carries its limitations—she is to be “obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled by nature,” but such limitations are, well, shitty.

“There’s the hairdressing … that alone will take at least an hour of my morning … there’s looking in the looking glass … there’s being chaste year in and year out,” she lists. “Christ Jesus!”

After returning to London, Orlando learns she is the victim of two lawsuits: after such a long absence, she was either presumed dead, and as such cannot own property, or is indeed a woman, "which amounts to much the same thing," the Chorus says.

"Christ Jesus!"

Ruhl’s text is not the most nuanced look at gender, but a play that spans half a millennium in under two hours is not meant to be; a graduate class in gender studies this is not. What Orlando reveals, however, is something richer: the act of love that is adaptation.

Like Orlando herself, Woolf’s novel is frequently given new life. Ulrike Ottinger’s 1981 film Freak Orlando blended elements of the book with Tod Browning’s 1932 seminal horror flick, Freaks. A later film version, Sally Potter’s in 1992, starred Tilda Swinton. There have been multiple Orlando operas. Like Davis’s production, more recent adaptations have explicitly cast trans and nonbinary artists; Neil Bartlett’s 2022 stage adaptation starred Emma Corrin, and theorist Paul B. Preciado’s documentary Orlando, My Political Biography explored contemporary queer culture through twenty-one trans and nonbinary people playing Orlando.

“Every Orlando,” Preciado said, “is a transgender person who is risking his, her, or their life on a daily basis as they find themselves forced to confront government laws, history, and psychiatry, as well as traditional notions of the family and the power of multinational pharmaceutical companies.”

Each adaptation is its own declaration and unique thank you to Woolf. Ruhl’s, in classic fashion, is full of as much whimsy as acuity. Four times in her text, Orlando says, “I am alone.” The same three words carry different meanings each time they’re uttered. She says it to bemoan her romantic state, yes, but not every instance is a pity party. Elated, Orlando also says it when she is free from the archduke and that awkward encounter.

In saying “I am alone,” Orlando might not be saying “I am by myself” but “I am myself,” a mini manifesto and a moment to reflect. Each romantic encounter, voyage to faraway lands, or pondering of words to precisely fit a poem unlocks another transformation, or what we may simply call growth. Orlando’s becoming a woman does not stop hers. She is a woman: “Yes—but a million other things as well,” she says.

That includes a bemused lover. (What other role makes us feel so jittery yet vulnerable?) Romancing a Russian princess, archduchess, and more, Orlando falls most deeply for an esquire, whom she thinks is a woman.

“You have a passion for peppermints,” Orlando justifies. “And … you listen.”

How forgiving that, even after centuries of experiences, we may still not fully understand ourselves, or others. Tumbling from year to year and lover to lover, Orlando is always on the precipice of finally knowing herself. She is a theatrical Frances Ha, sprinting from chapter to chapter and gathering wisdom like wind for an ever-soaring kite.

Woolf’s novel concludes on the stroke of midnight on October 11, 1928—the day Orlando: A Biography was to be published. Continued adaptations illuminate new ages, new precipices. In the minutes, weeks, and century since, what light have we almost touched?