Arguably the greatest gender-bending literary work ever written, Virginia Woolf’s novel “Orlando” holds all kinds of pleasures for postmodern revisionists.
Written for Woolf’s lover, Vita Sackville-West, this tale begins in the Renaissance and charts the journey through history of a young aristocrat named Orlando. Told by Elizabeth I that he must never grow old, the courtier somehow achieves that feat. But as he progresses through the next several hundred years, he turns into a woman. Orlando takes this magical overnight transformation–which occurs in the middle of the 18th Century–with remarkable calmness. And with a hero/heroine straddling both genders, Woolf was able to satirize the timeless social and sexual mores of male-female interplay.
Thanks to a 1992 Sally Potter film, this difficult-to-dramatize narrative text reached a large new audience. Instead of ending with the novel in 1928, Potter’s cleverly ambivalent movie even continued the transsexual’s journey into the modern age, closing with Orlando riding a motorcycle.
Director Joyce Piven’s live version, which opened in Evanston last weekend, avoids such radical gestures. Utilizing a new adaptation by Sarah Ruhl, Piven uses an ensemble cast and splits the title role between a man and a woman (Scot Morton and Justine Scarpa). The narrative voice of the show is similarly shared among actors clad in neutral white and playing a multitude of characters.
As one might expect from such a distinguished acting studio, the performances are exceptionally well-spoken and physically adroit (tuneful singing from Jonathan Clark is a pleasant enhancement). Actors like the impressive Scarpa find a great deal of emotional intensity. And even though this production is very simple, Piven crafts her actors’ bodies into such rich and multilayered stage pictures that it seems many more resources are being utilized.
But Ruhl’s prosaic and conservative adaptation seems disappointingly safe (the split Orlando is an especially dull choice), flattening out most of the chronological and other complexities of the novel and shying away from interesting dramatic meditations on gender. Thus the show tends to stay on one level with Orlando losing much of his/her fascination. We certainly enjoy attractive actors speaking lovely poetry–but we learn little of Woolf’s subversive soul.
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“Orlando”
When: Through June 28
Where: Piven Theatre Workshop, Noyes Cultural Arts Center, 929 Noyes St., Evanston
Phone: 847-866-6597
