Queerguru needs a very good reason to leave sunny Miami for a bitterly cold New York but here is an excellent one……Taylor Mac. The genius actor/performer/writer is a self-described “fool” and “collagist” who puts together forms and costumes to create a complex and sometimes contradictory look and sound. As he has resisted categorization by the press, we’ll tread carefully other than to tell you he is about to star in Sarah Ruhl’s Orlando directed by Will Davis at the Signature Theatre.
Ruhl’s acclaimed adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel about an epic hero who journeys through gender and time returns to the New York stage, with a gender expansive cast and a new, buoyant, World-Building production from Davis.
Orlando was written by Woolf for her lover, Vita Sackville-West. The titular character’s adventures begin as a young man, when he serves as courtier to Queen Elizabeth. Through many centuries of living, he becomes a 20th-century woman, trying to sort out her existence.
This theatrical trip through space, time, and gender features Mac plays Orlando, along with an ensemble of acclaimed, boundary-breaking performers, including Janice Amaya (Off-Broadway: Lunch Bunch, SHHHH), Nathan Lee Graham (Broadway: Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; Film: Zoolander), Tony-winning Fun Home writer Lisa Kron (Broadway: Well; Off-Broadway: Good Person of Szechuan), Jo Lampert (Off-Broadway: Joan of Arc: Into the Fire, Hundred Days), and TL Thompson (Broadway: Straight White Men; Off-Broadway: Is This a Room?).
Will Davis, the director and choreographer recently appointed Artistic Director of Rattlestick Theater, describes Ruhl’s joyously elliptical adaptation of Woolf’s eons-ahead-of-its-time canonical novel as a “bid for liberation.” Davis envisions his production as an actor-operated “handmade spectacle” in which performers with distinct relationships to and journeys with gender create and erase, inhabit and leap across whole centuries onstage in real-time.
04.02.24–05.12.24 / Tue–Sun
The Irene Diamond Stage
Signature Theatre
Labels: 2024, NY, Orlando, Sarah Ruhl, Signature Theater, Taylor Mac, Will Davis
