Sarah Ruhl Reintroduces Virginia Woolf’s ‘Orlando’ 100 Years Later, This Time to Audiences Who Are Ready for It

“No human being, since the world began, has ever looked more ravishing. Their form combined in one the strength of a man and a woman's grace.”
– Orlando

TL Thompson and Taylor Mac in Orlando at Signature Theatre. Photo by Joan Marcus.

This story is a bit different for me as I don’t usually get personal with the artists I interview. This time, though, I ended up throwing that rule out the window because of how beautifully the circumstances of my life lined up with seeing Orlando at Signature Theatre. My conversation with Sarah Ruhl, the playwright who adapted Woolf’s 1928 novel for the stage, turned out to be much more than just an interview for a story.

I am currently eight weeks removed from top surgery, but it was even fewer than that when I saw Orlando. Finally free of bandages and compression garments and cleared to return to my normal routine, I had packed my schedule full of the plays and musicals I was dying to get back to. The very first on the list just so happened to be this one.

I already knew the play told the story of the expansive life of a British nobleman who lives through centuries only to wake up one day and find she has transformed into a woman. I also knew the cast was composed entirely of queer actors, directed by award-winning trans director Will Davis, and led by groundbreaking, genderfluid performer Taylor Mac. What I did not know was how much Orlando’s story would mirror my own.

In this production, Orlando’s gender transformation happens privately, offstage. It’s a departure from other productions of the play and one that Davis suggested. In previous productions, Orlando’s transition always happened in front of the audience. “I've seen it done a variety of ways on stage, maybe with varying degrees of nudity,” said Ruhl. “[In this production,] Orlando has privacy off stage. I thought that was such a beautiful, quiet, true way to stage it.” As Orlando exits, the chorus takes over the storytelling, explaining how after throwing an extravagant party, Orlando fell into a deep, days-long sleep — and woke up changed.

As I sat in the audience, my chest still numb and tingling in the aftermath of my surgery, I was astounded. I had just gone through a profoundly similar experience. A character written in 1928 and adapted for the stage in 1998 was speaking directly to my lived experience in 2024. My deep sleep was induced by anesthesia, I woke up a truer version of myself, and I was now learning how to navigate my world in my altered body. I’d have loved to tell Virginia Woolf what this moment meant to me, but she’s been gone since 1941 — so I needed Sarah Ruhl to know.

Our conversation was full of curiosity and connection. I shared my personal experience with her in an admittedly rare expression of vulnerability and felt so much gratitude for the warmth with which she received me. She gave Davis, the company, and the circumstances of the production a ton of credit for creating a show that could have such an impact. “With every iteration [of Orlando], the times have changed, and I feel like it's finally landing in the perfect spot,” she says. When the play was first staged, the discourse around gender fluidity and transness was much different.

Ruhl was first commissioned to adapt the novel in 1998 by her acting teacher and founder of Piven Theatre Workshop, Joyce Piven. It was Ruhl’s second play — she’s written more than 20 by now — and her first professional commission. She credits her youthful hubris for letting her go ahead with it. “It was an enormous amount of trust to place in me,” she said. “I knew the novel. I love the novel. And I was too young to think, ‘Oh, that's intimidating.’ I just thought, ‘Oh, what fun!’”

Much of the text is pulled verbatim from Woolf’s novel, and to this day, the text of the play has not changed much, says Ruhl. But she left the staging purposefully elastic. “The production elements and how the company is assembled varies wildly from production to production,” says Ruhl. It calls for a minimum of three chorus members and up to “as many as you can fit on a stage and pay.”

Piven’s original 1998 production had two actors play Orlando — a man played him pre-transition and a woman played her post-transition. It was a creative decision Ruhl rejected from the start but felt too timid to push back against. “That's how Joyce Piven wanted to do it. I disagreed with her,” said Ruhl. “It was the wrong choice, and the reviewer noted that and blamed me for it. Joyce called me the next morning and said, ‘You took the hit for me.’”

Subsequent iterations saw Orlando mainly played by a cis woman, so much so that at the time of my call with Ruhl, the dramatis personae on her website explicitly called for it. When I asked her why, she exclaimed, “God, that's terrible. It’s not that way in the text anymore. I will change it on my website.” And she has. The DP no longer specifies any gender for any of the characters. “I've talked to directors about casting, and I say, just forget anything I say on the front piece. It should be cast expansively and in a bespoke way for your ensemble,” she said.

For Ruhl, the evolution of how the show has been cast and staged is a direct reflection of the cultural climate. “We're in a new moment of talking about gender in this country and in the theater,” she said. For Ruhl, the source material has always provided the proper guideposts, and she says that only now are we “catching up to Woolf” who was using they/them pronouns to describe Orlando at the crux of their transformation in the novel. “Her prescience is really extraordinary,” said Ruhl. “She was onto something so profound.”

One of the largest ensembles she’s seen take on Orlando was a production near and dear to her heart — it was her daughter’s high school play. “They had two Orlandos and they had a cast of 25,” she said. “That was very meaningful to me, particularly after seeing the play in much different contexts 25 years ago, where I felt like it was a fight to foreground queer love stories.” Now she was seeing her teenage daughter perform it with her classmates. “I thought, ‘Wow, the kids get it.’”

But Ruhl hopes Orlando’s journey isn’t over yet. Woolf’s novel entered the public domain in January, making Ruhl’s adaptation eligible for licensing, a move that could give the play a much wider reach. “I'm ready for a ban of it in Florida or something,” she joked.

But for now, Taylor Mac’s embodiment of Orlando is grounding the time-and-gender traveler in the now. “It's such a moment of both liberation and horror for the trans community in this country,” she said. “It's been very joyful with this particular company, and healing, I think, to tell a story together.” It was certainly joyful and healing for this particular audience member.

Orlando runs through May 12 at Signature Theatre.