Last year, for Pride Month, I read Orlando by Virginia Woolf. It is a rather unique book, with a unique style. And, of course, a gender bending story that was a paean to her long-time partner, Vita Sackville-West.
When I saw that Bakersfield College was going to do Sarah Ruhl’s stage adaptation of the novel, I definitely wanted to see it. In part, to see how on earth such a bizarre and unusual novel could be made to fit and work on a stage in a reasonable amount of time.
As it turns out, Ruhl used the overall framing of the story, and borrowed a lot of great lines from the book, but restricted her version to just her favorite episodes. This means, for example, that we lose the sojourn among the Gypsies (which hasn’t aged that well), and much of the engagement with literary critics. But the episodes that remain are well chosen, and make for a surprisingly coherent narrative arc on stage.
The central story, as I noted in my post on the book, is that Orlando switches from male to female midway through the story. Why or how, we never know - just that he undoubtedly became she.
The story takes place over hundreds of years - starting in the court of Queen Elizabeth the First, and continuing until the day the book was set to publish. This meant a lot of costume changes, which I’m sure were a ton of fun for the costume crew, and fascinating to watch on stage as well.
Like the book, the stage version was quite funny, with so much pointed commentary on gender relations and stereotypes. The play leans into the humor, some of it slapstick, and overall felt a little less heavy than the book. On the other hand, because of what was cut, you miss out on some of the period-specific satire that I, as a reader of old books, loved about the original. No shade on Ruhl here, because transferring that to stage was probably impossible.
In some stage versions, this has gone so far as having one or both versions of Orlando nude. I think that is unnecessary, and I will note that BC’s version was only mildly titillating: at times the quick changes were done on stage, so you got to see the actor in high-coverage underthings.
What BC did do that has become standard practice for the play is to cast the key parts using transgender or non-binary actors. Virginia Woolf may have lived in a very different era, but I think she would have loved this choice.
One change that BC did that I think was a great idea was to split Orlando into two parts, listed in the playbill as “Orlando of the Present” and “Orlando of the Past.” I suspect this was done both to give two actors significant parts and to split the otherwise huge number of lines up. Because of the way the play is written - Orlando narrates much of his life using lines from the book - the memorization was difficult enough with two actors splitting it.
In this case, the older (present) Orlando was played by Kaine Brockenbrough, while the younger was played by Reece Olinger. The way the split ended up, Brockenbrough did more of the acted parts of the adult Orlando, both male and female, while Olinger played the young boy and continued to comment on the action as an observer of his/her future self.
It is a bit difficult to explain how all this worked, but work it did. I didn’t find any difficulty following the story or figuring out which version of Orlando was which.
I will also add that Olinger opened and closed the play with a song, playing acoustic guitar and singing without a microphone. Their voice is quite lovely, and was a great addition to the play.
Also playing across gender were Alex Young as Sasha and Marmaduke, and Alex Mackenzie as Queen Elizabeth. There was also the actor who played the countess and the count (another gender-fluid role in the book), but since the rest of the cast are simply listed as “Chorus,” I am not sure of their identity.
I’ll just note that the cast did a great job, and I really was impressed with the quality of the production from top to bottom.
This is a great example of the high-quality work that our local junior college and university have been putting on lately. A play like Orlando isn’t standard fare, but one that the cast has to sell well to a potentially skeptical audience (including friends and family.)
I wish I had had a chance to write this before the show closed - it ran only one weekend, and I had both a concert and a departure on vacation immediately afterward, so it was just impossible. I hope others attended and enjoyed it.
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