‘Orlando’ Review: Vision of Love

metroweekly.com:

Orlando (★★★★☆) are having fun onstage, and their good time is infectious. Of course, Sarah Ruhl’s frolicsome, gender-swapping adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando: A Biography supplies a sound blueprint for the farcical shenanigans this company puts over heartily.The play also captures the romance and scope of the novel, as well as the ripe sexuality in the tale of Orlando (Mary Myers), whose journey toward their true self spans continents and centuries.

Time for Orlando can’t be measured just by the clocks that line the flower petal-covered walls of Sarah Beth Hall’s dreamy, lavender salon and boudoir set.Born to English nobility during the Elizabethan age, Orlando grows up a starry-eyed boy, full of vigor and charm.

He vows to compose a great, epic ode to his favorite oak tree, but sets aside his poetry upon meeting Queen Elizabeth I (Alan Naylor, in a royally amusing turn).Utterly besotted with the teen, the not-so-Virgin Queen bids him to serve in her court, where Orlando finds himself besotted with Russian princess Sasha (Edmée-Marie Faal).Orlando blossoms in their affair, reveling in his manhood. “For there could be no doubt of his sex,” we’re told.

But after he feels the sting of romantic betrayal, and moves to Constantinople to avoid overzealous admirer Archduchess Harriet (Arika Thames), he discovers another side of himself.At 30, Orlando wakes up a woman, who tries donning a dress and other trappings of ladylike presentation, but finally decides to switch up her gender presentation and wardrobe as she pleases.She revels in combining in one figure the strength of a man, and grace of a woman, and she goes on to live for centuries, alternately adored by both men and women.Crucially, she finds love again,.