From the Playwright

My encounters with Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a queer classic, have been encounters with joy. Woolf apparently wrote Orlando with more joy, buoyancy, and speed than any of her other novels. The character of Orlando, based on Virginia’s lover Vita Sackville-West, famously begins life as a man in the Elizabethan era, trots through a couple more centuries, dodging various lovers, and in the 18th century, after a long sleep, wakes up, a woman. Woolf wrote in a letter, “I have written this book quicker than any; & it is all a joke; & yet gay & quick reading I think; a writer’s holiday.”

Woolf apparently had so much fun writing the book it felt like a holiday, like not-work, a triumph over the melancholy and writer’s block that sometimes plagued her. Woolf wrote in a letter to Vita, “Yesterday I was in despair…I couldn’t screw a word from me; and at last dropped my head in my hands; dipped my pen in the ink, and wrote these words, as if automatically, on a clean sheet: Orlando: a biography. No sooner had I done this than my body was flooded with rapture and my brain with ideas. I wrote rapidly until 12.” That spark of joy in the work is what first attracted me to the novel—the palpable feeling of joy in the speed of Woolf’s invention--that rush of language—an incandescent and yet almost physical quality. For one thing, it’s funnier than her other books. I can almost feel Virginia willing Vita to laugh over her shoulder while reading the pages.

Orlando was light years ahead of its time (1928) in terms of its expansive, fluid, liberatory views of gender and sexuality. Conversations around gender have changed monumentally in the culture since I first adapted this novel in 1998. At times it feels as though we are only now catching up to Virginia Woolf, who wrote in A Room of One’s Own that the “androgynous mind is resonant and porous…transmits emotion without impediment…is naturally creative, incandescent, and undivided.”

Though I added one word to Orlando last week, I wrote the first draft relatively quickly, twenty-five years ago, aided by the intrepid speed of youth. I was asked originally to adapt the novel when I was just out of Brown University, where I had studied with the great Paula Vogel, and where I decided to become a playwright. Another mentor, Joyce Piven, with whom I had studied acting, asked me to adapt Orlando for her theater company in Evanston. At my tender age, I already was a Woolf devotee, and had devoured and loved the novel. I had looked to literary models of expansive non-fixed desire and liberatory views of gender to make sense of my own growing-up self, and I had already inhaled Woolf. I said yes to Joyce immediately. Lucky for me, I was too young to be daunted by the epic scale of the novel. When people ask me how I distilled the novel, I answer that, though there were complexities along the way, the first draft was simple: I chose my favorite, most theatrical bits and then put them in an order.

What a profound joy to finally land here at Signature Theatre, twenty-five years later, with the incredible director Will Davis. When I first met Will for coffee to discuss Orlando, among other possible theatrical ventures, and we talked, and talked, and talked, I thought: where has this artistic collaborator been all my life? We seemed to share a language and a mission. Working with Will post-pandemic, he reminds me why I ever wanted to do theater in the first place—a conjuring of joy, possibility, community, and transcendence.

Building an ensemble production around the divine center of Taylor Mac has been a profoundly happy experience. I’ve known Taylor since we were at New Dramatists (down the block) together as playwrights. I’d always admired Taylor as a writer and performer, and when I saw the seminal 24-Decade History of Popular Music, with Taylor moving through the centuries and in and out of genders, in Machine Dazzle’s epic costumes—I gasped inwardly, thinking—Taylor Mac must play Orlando someday! This production has managed to include so many writer/performers I have long admired, including Lisa Kron--fitting for a story with writing at the center of it.

Just before we started rehearsals at Signature, I had the pleasure of seeing (and hearing) my almost grown-up daughter, Anna, in the play, playing the violin and the bass, at her high school. To see kids I had known since kindergarten now inhabiting these roles with such life-affirming playfulness was a trip. I thought of Orlando’s line “This must be middle-age. Time has passed over me…” I know of no better definition of growing up than the one provided by Woolf in Orlando: “I am growing up. I am losing some illusions, perhaps to acquire others.” The director of that high school production, Laura Barnett, pointed out that the word “love” is used thirty-six times in the text, and Orlando is thirty-six years old by the end of the play.

I have always been a sucker for a good love story. Vita Sackville-West’s son Nigel Nicholson said of Orlando that it was “the longest love letter in history.” I am beguiled by artistic works of dedication that are intrinsic gifts before they ever reach a wider audience. I am of the belief that the wider audience gets a taste of the initial gift. Thanks to this extraordinary group of performers and collaborators for putting this work into your hands, in the present moment.

Acknowledgments:

I would love to acknowledge with gratitude the many productions I’ve seen of Orlando over the years that have shaped the text, some with dear collaborators like Polly Noonan, Jessica Thebus, Rebecca Taichman, David Greenspan, Esperanza Rosales Balcárcel, Annie-B Parsons, Frankie Faridany, Howard Overshown, Tom Nelis, Katie Lindsay, the guiding wisdom and friendship of P. Carl, with the greatest of gratitude to Joyce Piven for asking me to do this in the first place!

- Sarah Ruhl

At the link below, you will find resources that will give you a closer look at the world of ORLANDO.

ORLANDO: A DEEPER DIVE

Signature Theatre is built on the unceded lands of Lenapehoking, homeland of the Lenape, which was colonized by European settlers starting in the 17^th Century.  We are a home for storytellers, and this acknowledgment is only a starting point in our commitment to building an inclusive community.  As part of that commitment, we lift up playwrights and storytellers of all cultures, and welcome all audiences in our spaces.

04.02.24 - 05.12.24

Time and Place:
Elizabethan England to the present moment

RUNNING TIME:
1 hour and 40 minutes
including a ten-minute intermission

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