Eggtooth Productions presents Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a benefit for the Academy of Music’s new LGBTQ+ Youth Program. Featuring Linda Tardif in the title role, this ensemble cast includes Kyle Boatwright, Lindel Hart, and Rich Vaden with Broadway makeup artist and beloved character Mr. Drag, Joe Dulude II, as Queen Elizabeth. This fantastical production offers lighting design by John Bechtold, costumes by Christina Beam, and is stagemanaged by Nikki Beck. Orlando is made possible through the generous donations of the Markham Nathan Fund for Social Justice, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and Plum Boutique of Northampton.
Based upon the Virginia Woolf novel, this is the story of a young nobleman who is drawn into a love affair with Queen Elizabeth I. For a time, life at court is interesting enough, but Orlando yearns for something more. As he strives to make his way as a poet and lover, his travels through time and space keep him at the heart of a dazzling tale where gender and gender freedom shift regularly, often with hilarious results. Though deeply funny, the play is also heartfelt and moving, as Orlando seeks liberation through art, identity, gender, and time becoming a 20th century woman in the process.
An adaptation of the “longest and most charming love letter in literature,” written by Virginia Woolf for her lover, Vita Sackville-West, Orlando is a theatrical, wild, fantastical trip through 400 years of history. About her play, Ruhl writes, “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.’
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.’”
This dreamy adaptation is a magical and poetic dance between gender and through time, a fantastical world in which courtly movement and biographical narration combine to tell the story of a being who lives outside of human expectations, and enjoys the liberation that being alive has to offer.
