Review: Taylor Mac Journeys Through Genders and Centuries in an Exuberant Orlando

“I am growing up — I am losing some illusions, perhaps to acquire others.” So says Orlando, played by a captivating Taylor Mac in Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s most unabashedly comical and imaginative novel. Ruhl wrote the script 25 years ago, but never has its story seemed more of our time, or ahead of its time. Director Will Davis has ensembled a brilliant cast and created an Orlando filled with color, music, laughter, and mystery in a production that can only be described as pure joy.

When we first meet Orlando, he is a 16-year-old Duke in Elizabethan England, where he becomes a favorite of Queen Elizabeth (Nathan Lee Graham delivers vintage camp in an outlandishly gorgeous dress designed by Oana Botez). Wearing hip-high red boots, Orlando becomes the toast of the Court and is admired for having the best calves anywhere. But to the queen’s chagrin, he falls in love with a Russian princess (a mesmerizing Janice Amaya) who betrays him. In despair, he renounces women and flees to Constantinople. There, Orlando falls into a strange sleep awakens one morning — as a woman. Fantastically, Orlando traverses the centuries, taking lovers along the way, and we last see her at the age of 36 during the Roaring Twenties.

Inspired by the life of her lover Vita Sackville-West, Woolf wrote her novel in the spirit of fun, something that this production has gleefully doubled down on. For the most part, the show is told using Woolf’s own poetic language, while Davis uses whimsical, larger-than-life elements to illuminate Orlando’s journey. Signature’s spacious Diamond stage allows for a gigantic, eye-popping mural of an Elizabethan village to descend during the first scene, and later an enormous pendulum takes its place, a compelling metaphor for the undulating waves of the sea and the passage of time (set design by Arnulfo Maldonado).

Beautiful touches like that serve as backdrops for the actors’ playfulness throughout. Fun Home lyricist Lisa Kron does some full-on clowning as the Archduke who tries to win Orlando’s heart. Jo Lampert gives a hilarious performance as the maid Mrs. Grimsditch, who nearly goes to pieces when Orlando asks her to take her wedding ring off. Rad Pereira delivers heart-throb sexiness as the sailor whom Orlando falls madly in love with, and so does TL Thompson as the Sea Captain who cares for Orlando on her voyage back to England.

Mac keeps us rapt as he glides seamlessly across the centuries and from one gender to another while delighting in the outward vestiges of the various eras in the form of fabulous wigs (designed by the Wig Associates) and Botez’s glimmering costumes. Barbara Samuels’s brilliantly colorful lighting makes them shimmer in the show’s party atmosphere as the cast dances through the ages to clubby music churned out by sound designer Brendan Aanes.

Woolf was far ahead of her contemporaries in looking beyond the binary as it relates to sexuality and identity, and she was ahead of most of us too. That makes this production of Orlando right now feel like a welcome and long-overdue sigh of relief as we grow up and lose some of our own illusions too.