Orlando

Or: Wild Goose

Sarah Ruhl and Virgina Woolf make a marvelous couple. Like oranges and chocolate, they make a surprising blend: Woolfs wryness and middle-distance dreaming to the patter and poetry of Ruhl’s Ruhliness. Woolf’s biography/love-letter/manifesto/autobiography/musing/whatyouwill of the incredibly handsome, gender-fluid, five hundred year old Orlando (Ellen Campbell) and herms adventures across society and own multi-facetted soul allows her adapter to engage in her capricious magic as well as sharpen and shine her own sensibilities.

In a space not much larger than a modern bedroom, the ensemble shimmers and, with the help of some straightforward shadow puppetry, leads us across time and space, through complex narratives, with both curtness and a playful looseness. Campbell seems to be having a ball of the time, relishing Orlando’s excess of sprits, from paroxysms of joy to flaccid ennui. She follows Orlando’s search for hermselves, from the skating of breathless, gasping lines, to a montage of coming to grips with her’s new body and soul. She’s set up and bounced from partner to partner like Ashley Ann Howell’s devilish Archduke, Edith Grace Dull’s proud feral felineness as the Russian Princess Sasha, and Danielle Lyon frank and forward portrayal of Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine.

Much of the story involves Orlando’s frustrations on being a poet, forever trying to describe what things are, and how to capture them, or even if that is the right thing to do. The action does puddle towards the end, and our attentions with it, but that moral quest, and the language it inspires from both its authors delicate phrases on what it is to be and seek a purpose in the world.