ORLANDO Tickets

By: Sarah Ruhl, adapted from the novel by Virginia Woolf
Director: Will Davis
Choreography: Will Davis
Producer: Signature Theatre
Cast list: Taylor Mac (as Orlando), Janice Amaya, Nathan Lee Graham, Lisa Kron, Jo Lampert, TL Thompson
Design: Arnulfo Maldonado
Costumes: Oana Botez
Lighting: Barbara Samuels
Sound: Brendan Aanes
Other info: Original music by Brendan Aanes, intimacy coordination by Ann C. James, props supervision by Matt Carlin

The Orlando play is based on the novel of the same name by Virginia Woolf that was written for her lover. The Sarah Ruhl play was first staged in Illinois in 1998 before enjoying productions in New York and around the world. Now, Ruhl, a Tony Award nominee and one of the most-produced contemporary playwrights in America, brings Orlando off Broadway once more. The production’s themes of gender exploration and our collective ability to evolve feel as timely as ever.

Will Davis, a transgender artist and the show’s director, describes Ruhl’s joyful adaptation of Woolf’s ahead-of-its-time novel as a “bid for liberation.” Davis envisions his production as an actor-operated “handmade spectacle” in which performers with unique relationships to gender inhabit and leap across whole centuries onstage in real-time. The Signature Theatre’s Irene Diamond Stage is a visible site of invention, giving audiences a treat and actors the most possible space to traverse in Davis’s athletic production.

What to watch for

• The production features a stacked cast of LGBTQ New York talent. Taylor Mac plays Orlando, along with an ensemble of acclaimed, boundary-breaking performers, including Janice Amaya (Lunch Bunch, SHHHH), Nathan Lee Graham (Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; Zoolander), Tony Award-winning Fun Home writer Lisa Kron (Well, Good Person of Szechuan), Jo Lampert (Joan of Arc: Into the Fire, Hundred Days), and TL Thompson (Straight White Men, Is This A Room).
• In a statement, director Will Davis shared that in “every environment that the audience will experience century to century or scene to scene, we will watch the ensemble build and then take apart. That’s part of the dedication to a bid for liberation and the dramaturgical imperative of queer place-making: define things on your own terms and then share that with others.”
• Sarah Ruhl has found success at Signature before. In 2023, the theatre’s world premiere of her play Letters from Max, a ritual — an adaptation of the 2018 book Letters from Max: A Poet, a Teacher, a Friendship by Ruhl and Max Ritvo — moved critics as a rare “theatrical act of remembrance,” The New York Times review reads.
• In choosing Taylor Mac for the role of Orlando, Sarah Ruhl said she wanted an actor comfortable with directly speaking to and engaging with the audience: “In A 24-Decade History, Taylor Mac talked to the audience all night long. I remember first seeing that show [...] and thinking, ‘Taylor needs to be Orlando.’”

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