The Off Broadway Theatre Review: Orlando: A Rhapsody
By Dennis W.
The mixture of fantasy, twisted history, gender identity, and the fluidity of time and being is what still keeps readers pouring over Virginia Woolf’s dazzling historical best-selling novel about Orlando, an Elizabethan hero/ine who will live for centuries defying both death and time, and who also changes gender from male to female.
Orlando: A Rhapsody, is based on Woolf’s character and was written and performed by the father and daughter team of Steven Epp (Formerly Co-Artistic Director of Theatre de la Jean Lune, 2005 Tony for Best Regional Theater) and Vinora Epp (2018 Graduate: l’Ecole de la Comédie de Saint-Etinne in France) who is also making her directorial debut. Vinora says she was fascinated with Virginia Woolf and was “compelled to transcribe her world to the stage… (she) knew that the aesthetic dialogue between her, myself, and my father could be fertile ground to work on.” Orlando: A Rhapsody is having its world premiere at The Tank in The Garment District in May.
When the house opens and I enter the theater, I am drawn to a single man sitting upstage left casually reading, lost in his own world, and listening to something on skimpy headphones (they do not appear substantial enough to drown out people talking and finding their seats.) Perplexed, I find my seat.
The rhapsody begins with old Orlando, the lone man (Steven Epp) once again, just reading in the corner seemingly unaware of the goings-on around him. Taking his place at a table center stage, he speaks “Now to sum up.” Meanwhile, Vinora begins her transformation into Orlando. Starting with the most obvious change of binding her breasts, a wisp of a mustache is put on with a pencil, as well as an Elizabethan-styled coat with a ruffled collar. Then with a flourish, Orlando has arrived. The stream-of-consciousness script pays homage to Woolf’s style but is confusing to stay engaged with and to follow as the words tumble from actors. The script moves from Orlando’s tragic love affair with Sasha, a vague Russian Princess, who mysteriously abandons him during the Great London Frost, to his/her writings and the “The Oak Tree” poem begun by Orlando as a young man and finished 300 years later by a later Orlando after his fantastical transformation into a woman.
There is no traditional dialogue as the two players effortlessly pick up where the other leaves off. The only real interaction is when old Orlando changes clothes with young Orlando, putting on the Elizabethan look and the two together transform him making up his face to be neither male nor female. This exploration is evident throughout the rhapsody that gender is fluid and this idea of gender haunts the story from beginning to end.
Moving on from Orlando the two actors, as father and daughter, get into a dialogue about experiences, youth, gender, pain, and storytelling then slip back into Orlando.
Orlando: A Rhapsody is not for everyone. You can hear the language of Virginia Woolf as the Epps examine feminism, their relationship to each other, and death in the fantastical world of Orlando that stretches for centuries and in their own lives. The richly colored material is dense and heavy with description, and the difficult stream-of-consciouses style of Virginia Woolf has ideas flowing by you in a torrent like a fast-moving river that is easy to get lost in.