Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando: A Biography, was a tribute to her lover, writer Vita Sackville-West. The character of Orlando changes sex half way through the story, symbolizing Vita’s bisexuality and gender fluidity. Vita had a penchant for dressing as a man and adopting male nicknames, when pursuing a woman. When she ran away to France with lady-love Violet Trefusis, she dressed as a man and went by the name “Julian.”
In this very queer production, only one actor out of five doesn’t change gender during the course of the play. Although Orlando’s is the most dramatic gender transition, three male actors play several male and female roles each; fluidly switching back and forth from male to female throughout the play, most of the time with little change of costume--gender indicated mainly by a change in body movement and raising or lowering of the voice.
Francesca Faridany is a splendid Orlando, with all the energy and bravado of a young man in the first act and the loveliness of a woman in the second, but with wistfulness for the freedom she had as a male. Oddly, I was so used to seeing Faridany dressed as a boy in pants in Act One, that I couldn’t quite get used to seeing her in a dress in Act Two, it didn’t seem to suit her as well. Possibly because the female Orlando didnt radiate as much energy as the male Orlando, making the point that women's lack of freedom and rights was choking the life out of her.
Annika Borras is striking as Sasha, Orlando’s exotic, skating-obsessed, lady-in-red with a poetic passion for the lonely Russian countryside, who ultimately breaks his heart.
When young nobleman Orlando falls for Russian princess Sasha, and embraces her, we are aware that, although the character of Orlando is male, on stage there is a woman embracing another woman, so their love affair has strong bisexual overtones. As does the affair between Orlando and Queen Elizabeth I, since Francesca Faridany is cross-dressed as the male Orlando and David Greenspan is cross-dressed as the Queen. The mind begins to boggle as heterosexuality is turned inside-out into something very queer. David Greenspan plays another gender-bending character, the comicly annoying Archduchess Henrietta (aka Archduke Harry) who confesses, after Orlando’s sex change, that she is really a man who had cross-dressed as a woman to pursue Orlando romantically. She changes back to a he, in order to pursues Orlando across gender boundaries.
The staging, choreography, costumes and set are quite inventive; some elements are elaborate and elegant, some minimalist. The Queen’s dress was the most ornate element, evoking past centuries. In one striking scene, the female Orlando is wearing an elaborate white dress with a train that dramatically swoops up into the sky, but the skyward end is tethered to rods protruding from the rafters, restricting the female Orlando’s freedom of movement. There is a miniature replica of Knole House, the English country mansion Sackville-West was unable to inherit because she was female, due to primogenture laws that only allowed first born males to inherit. Because Vita was female, upon the death of her father (the 3rd Lord Sackville), she lost the estate, which passed to an uncle, along with the title.
Orlando is a meditation on gender, sexual orientation, time, and freedom (especially freedom from restrictions on women that were still in force when Woolf was writing it in the 20’s.) It spans several centuries from the 16th Century Elizabethan era to the early 20th Century, when women still had less rights than men and were expected to lead more restricted lives. She also touches on the artistic difficulties encountered by writers.
The cross-dressing aspects are deliberately not performed as gender illusions but as obvious gender transgression: the elaborate dress of the queen is lowered from the rafters onto David Greenspan, but he does not don a wig or additional makeup to enhance his femininity and the dress is one-sided, in the back we can still see his pants. Francesca Faridany as Orlando is definitely androgynous, but we can tell she is a woman. The two ensemble actors, Tom Nelis and Howard Overshown, fluidly switch from male to female and back with little or no costume enhancement, so we are aware they are “performing” gender. This is a deliberately queer Orlando.
This stage adaptation of Woolf’s novel, by playwright Sarah Ruhl, with direction by Rebecca Taichman and choreography Annie-B Parson, preserves the poetic narrative language of the book and creates an amazing theatrical experience from this mythical tale of transformation.
Orlando is playing at Classic Stage Company through Oct 17.
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