Casting as Queer Dramaturgy: A Case Study of Sarah Ruhl’s Adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando

While casting choices always activate scripts in unique ways, making every production of a play different, alternative casting—decisions to modify the sex, gender presentation, sexuality, race, ethnicity, age, and so on of characters—changes the fabric of the play. This type of casting queers (in the broadest sense of the verb) a text and conveys meaning to an audience in subversive ways.

Yet, the act of theatrically queering Orlando would appear, on the surface, to be either redundant or excessive. Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando and Sarah Ruhl’s 1998 stage adaptation tell the story of Orlando (a man¹) who is in love with Sasha (a woman) and pursued by the Archduchess (a man posing as a woman).² After miraculously living through several centuries without aging, Orlando awakes to find himself a woman still in love with Sasha and pursued by the Archduchess who reveals herself to be the Archduke. Orlando ultimately marries Marmaduke, a male sailor she initially suspects might be a woman, and begins a new chapter of her journey (fig. 1). This is hardly a heteronormative narrative: both the novel and stage adaptation³ challenge narrowly defined conceptions of sex, gender, and sexuality; both texts are whimsical and satiric, and, especially given the challenges inherent in this multi-century adventure, Ruhl’s adaptation is remarkably faithful to the novel. Woolf’s tale, in performance, as rendered by Ruhl, is a richly textured feminist critique of sexual oppression. Nevertheless, a dramaturgical deconstruction of Orlando reveals the manner in which queer casting choices might enhance or undermine the play’s feminism.

Ruhl’s play requires a cast of an indeterminate number. She suggests that the Chorus, the members of which play over a dozen different parts, could be played by as few as three actors or as many as eight. She recommends three male actors. Moreover, in her introductory notes to Orlando, Ruhl, who uses some of Woolf’s narration verbatim, writes that “[t]he text is not broken down specifically into who says what, because each production will determine exactly who and what the chorus is, and how many members there are” (135). Thus a director, a dramaturg, or a collaborative duo of both director and dramaturg can not only adapt Ruhl’s own adaptation in assigning the lines of the Chorus, but also make casting choices that affect both the depiction of characters and the play’s social critique. These creative dramaturgical choices may fruitfully destabilize and further queer an already queer text.

Ruhl’s agent kindly provided me with an advance copy of Orlando in early 2012 and allowed me to direct the play at the University of Southern Maine in the spring of 2013 before it was officially published. My production made no change to the periods of the piece and honored the spirited romp through the centuries as written by Woolf and adapted by Ruhl. We used projections and video-mapping, designed by Shannon Zura, on a set designed by Perry Fertig, and layered costumes, designed by Joan Larkins Mather, to help move us through the centuries. Despite the challenges of the script and students’ initial unfamiliarity with Woolf’s novel, the production was well-received and -reviewed.⁴

As I engaged with the script, I realized that I could cast an actor of any sex in any role to enhance the play’s critique of cultural constructions of gender. I could cast the play as Ruhl suggests with “two women (one playing Orlando and one playing Sasha), surrounded by a chorus of three very gifted men,” or as she imagines it could work with two roles alternating: “on Mondays, have a man play Orlando (and a woman play Marmaduke), on Tuesdays, have a woman play Orlando (and a man play Marmaduke)” (136). Even Ruhl’s stage directions reflect both casting possibilities, as well as Orlando’s queer identity: “Orlando looks at the audience. ‘He’ is surprised and a bit crestfallen. Orlando is constantly surprising him/herself in the act of performance” (140).