Theatre in Review: Orlando (Signature Theatre)Virginia Woolf's prose is a lily that needs no gilding, but Will Davis' production applies plenty of shellac anyway. The occasion is Sarah Ruhl's adaptation of Woolf's celebrated novel, a picaresque epic rooted in shifting gender identity. Woolf's pinpoint prose, marked by an understated wit and a deep interiority, is not a natural for the stage. Indeed, her oeuvre seems almost anti-theatrical: I once saw the excellent Kathleen Chalfant come a cropper with a piece based on Mrs. Dalloway and neither Eileen Atkins nor Vanessa Redgrave were able to liven up Vita & Virginia, based on Woolf's correspondence with Vita Sackville-West, the model for the title character in Orlando. (To be sure, Atkins had a triumph with A Room of One's Room, taken from Woolf's famous essay, but the glory of that piece was its simplicity: A small stage and a great actress, arguing Woolf's line of thought with relentless acuity.) Orlando was first staged at CSC in 2010, in a production that has vanished from my memory; this is never a good sign. The text, a series of discrete episodes that take the title character through several centuries and a male-to-female transition, is almost anti-dramatic. Each sequence is distinct and reliant on a third-person narrative style that is less than engaging when delivered by a chorus of actors employing a battery of funny expressions and voices. In trying to theatricalize a brilliant work of prose, the company obscures it with devices that backfire, succeeding only at drawing attention to themselves. Davis' production faces other challenges: First, the strikingly unintimate Irene Diamond Theatre is an inhospitable environment for a piece that, ideally, should delivered in an insinuating murmur. Arnulfo Maldonado's minimalist set design leaves the small company stranded on a vast and empty stage. The designer supplies some sumptuous drops drawn from period paintings and Barbara Samuels' lighting is one of her most gorgeous achievements, achieving an astonishing number of subtle transformations. Each tableau is a stunner but a story that requires a sense of extreme close-up is given an epic treatment to which it doesn't respond. This is true even with Taylor Mac, a presence you don't forget, as Orlando. The actor runs the gamut, starting as a strapping Elizabethan youth who becomes stiflingly attached to a decrepit, possessive Elizabeth I, later falling hard for a Russian princess, and, becoming a woman, running off to Constantinople and marrying a sea captain before ending up a bemused sophisticate of the nineteen-twenties. Mac is a natural star - riveting even when standing under a single lighting unit and announcing, "I am alone" -- but the Macian style isn't a natural fit for the role. (It's typical of our contemporary theatre that a nonbinary performer best known for outrageous drag and a wild devotion to American popular song should somehow be the obvious choice for a character conceived by a sternly modernist imagination of the last century. To my mind, it's the strangest of pairings.) The rest of the company, prowling the stage en masse and doling out narration in single-linen increments, struggles to make an impression. (If one didn't know, going in, that the company features such familiar faces as Lisa Kron and Jo Lampert, they might go unrecognized.) As the Queen, Nathan Lee Graham, initially decked out in flowing gold lame that suggests an entry in a competition for Tudor realness, is wearyingly affected, biting off each line as if it were a delicious crumpet. (His delivery oddly reminded me of Eartha Kitt.) Kron and Janice Amaya labor with accents as thick as goulash and borscht, respectively, as the Roumanian aristocrat who has designs on Orlando, and Sasha, the winsome, yet faithless, Russian. Many talented performers have seemingly been urged to give in to their broadest instincts. Orlando is a costume designer's field day and Oana Botez doesn't disappoint, providing a survey of smartly stylized fashions that take us down through the centuries; this is her most sumptuous recent accomplishment. Brendan Aanes' sound design ranges from EDM, wintry winds, thunder, rain, percussion, ringing alarm clocks, and other solid effects, many of them signifying the appearance of new eras. A lot of skill and invention has been thrown at Orlando but, to me, most of it is wrongheaded and self-defeating. There is surely an audience that will respond to Davis' battery of devices, the presence of an authentic Off-Broadway star, and plenty of eye-catching design ideas. My advice? Read the book. --David Barbour 
|
