This past weekend, I had the opportunity to see the Swarthmore Theater Department’s production of “Orlando” — in the front row, nonetheless. Featuring rollerskates, rose petals, and cigarettes after sex (not the band), this year’s Acting Capstone invited audiences to consider the same questions posed by Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel “Orlando: A Biography”: how gender is constructed, how identity moves beyond social boundaries, and how time is fluid.
The minuscule but mighty cast consisted of four seniors — Lizzie Culp, Griffin Moore, Kana Nagata, and Frank Paz (all ’26). The cast presented their work in the Frear Ensemble Theater, with the audience surrounding the stage on all sides — the small, in-the-round space perfectly complementing the show’s introspective and inquisitive nature. Despite its size, the space was rich with intentional design. If the featured paintings of the actors’ faces superimposed onto portraits throughout history failed to evoke awe, then the painted floor resembling a palace’s marble halls or the countless silver rings suspended overhead would ensure that anyone in attendance would be thoroughly impressed. That being said, the set was also fundamentally minimalistic — no fancy furniture, aside from some office chairs, the chaise, and a handful of blocks painted with the same marble pattern.
While the decor was ornate, it was the cast’s absolute commitment to storytelling through their fully inhabited characters that truly illuminated the stage. One of the production’s most salient aspects was its handling of gender and the ever-changing nature of the self. Anyone familiar with Woolf’s novel is aware that the story contains more characters than there were performers in the cast, meaning each actor needed to take on multiple roles in addition to delivering narration throughout the play. Even the role of Orlando was split among the four actors, each taking a turn embodying the protagonist throughout the story’s approximately 400-year span. This choice made tangible the production’s meditation on identity and time as fluid forces. Orlando has an unnaturally lengthened lifespan, courtesy of magical realism and a ring gifted to him by the Queen. As each century passes, so does the role of Orlando, switched deliberately from one actor to another. Each actor brought their own unique energy to the character, creating a subtle, continuous evolution of Orlando’s identity.
This fluid casting also allowed the company to consider the role of gender, specifically within identity. At points in the story, male-identifying actors portrayed a female Orlando, and female-identifying actors embodied a male Orlando. In each transition, the cast demonstrated that gender is a social construct, underscoring the influence of situations, societal norms, and “the spirit of the age” on our performance of gender. As actors move in and out of masculinity and femininity, Orlando is given a unique sense of gender fluidity. The character and the world of the story transform into an elastic and expansive realm.
I was fortunate enough to sit in on a talk-back held after the opening night of “Orlando,” in which audience members — including students in Associate Professor of English Literature Sangina Patnaik’s class on Virginia Woolf — were able to ask questions to the director, Associate Professor of Theater K. Elizabeth Stevens, and the four members of the cast. After sprinting to the theater from Singer Hall (a distance so vast it was a miracle I arrived on time), I joined the cluster of participants gathered around the artists for what turned out to be an incredibly informative conversation.
While Woolf’s masterful writing, the poeticism of the script, and the director’s artistic vision were all cited as quintessential to the beauty of the production, the cast agreed that what truly made this show an affectual success was the collaborative devising process. This play is unique in that it demands a certain amount of flexibility. The actors needed to be ready to swap characters and convey to the audience a distinct change in identity in an instant, all while maintaining focus and avoiding exaggerated, cartoonish expression. To elicit the same effect produced by Woolf’s story, the transitions needed to be seamless — and they were. In order to fully embody the distinct characters each actor plays, they were encouraged to approach these situations with an intuitive, “head-empty” approach, as Frank described. By letting the body lead, the actors found natural, sincere responses to the story, forming their characters through following their instincts. This bottom-up approach to storytelling grounded each character in sensation, delivering characters that felt lived rather than performed. The ease found in being present in a character helped the actors find tenderness even in the story’s darkest moments. In finding sincerity and serenity through embodiment, the performance was unrestricted by rigid acting decisions or character choices, deepening the audience’s connection to the characters on stage through a natural authenticity, believable realism, and the freedom found in flexibility.
To fully command the attention of the audience, the cast of “Orlando” wanted to immerse their crowds in a fully-developed world — one that incorporates all elements of human emotion. While not lacking in comedic and farcical moments, Woolf’s story is a somber one, filled with the sting of lost love, the anxiety of an indiscernible sense of self, and the quiet ache brought about by change. With all these moments of melancholy, finding joy in the few moments of humor is essential to fully embodying life-like, breathing characters and a nuanced world.
During the talk-back, Culp described one way the cast was able to find merriment in the gloom of “Orlando” was by embracing a “joy-driven” rehearsal process. By leaning into the excitement of creation and the rush of revelation, the four seniors worked to create a final product that roused the same exuberance within the hearts of their audiences as they themselves felt. A great source of this joy was the unexpected moments of glee found in rehearsal. For example, the sparse, conceptual set pushed the cast to communicate by using the limited objects on stage abstractly and creatively. The use of physical movement proved crucial for transforming these ordinary objects, such when an office chair became an imagined 1920s-style automobile. Whether an oak tree or an automobile, every object carried the possibility of an unexpected reveal. By honing in on the euphoric silliness of the rehearsal process (such as speeding Culp around on an automobile made of office chairs), the company was able to create moments of relief from an otherwise serious tale, but also extract heightened symbolic meaning from each object. The abstraction of certain things — particularly Orlando’s quill and paper — drew attention away from the item itself and towards its thematic significance as an instrument of self-construction and the articulation of a constant presence (the tree) in a changing world. By diverting attention from the item’s physical presence, the artists encouraged their audience to see their symbolic presence in the work instead. As audience and actor joined in shared imagination, the contagious joy of performance infected the crowd with the same delight at discovery that was felt by the performers during rehearsal, forging a strong connection between the audience and the world itself.
Whether emphasizing feelings of joy or letting intuition light the way, the Acting Capstone’s rehearsal process was clear about its emphasis on discovery. Refusing rigid, conventional directing techniques, Moore explained that the cast and crew’s decision to embrace a “discovery-driven” process was intentional — one that ultimately lent them the flexibility to fully engage with the Modernist masterpiece they were adapting. When working with choreographer Madga San Millan, the ensemble was tasked with experimenting with a diverse array of actions — guided by intuition, play, and creative impulse — to determine which movements best conveyed the shifting state of the story. By exploring the possibilities of what’s given rather than simply memorizing blocking, the cast adjusted their movements to reflect their understanding of the underlying reasons of each movement within the work, discovering purpose behind every step. This method generates moments of intense theatrical clarity.
One of the most essential discoveries was the use of a ring. Originally unimportant in both Woolf’s writing and Ruhl’s adaptation, the ring is gifted to Orlando by the Queen he serves as a young man. In this particular production, as the role of Orlando passed between actors, so did this ring, in a very stylized, dramatic process that involved violent convulsions and slightly more subtle gestures of the fingers to illustrate the transformation. This ring was the only feature that carried through every actor’s costume and portrayal of the character, and it ultimately became essential to the cast’s understanding of the play. Moore explained that this idea was found during a particular rehearsal in which he (as the Queen) slipped a costume ring off his hand and onto Culp’s (who was portraying Orlando in that moment) finger. That moment gave birth to more than an exchange of props: the ring became a point of orientation for the characters and the actors, creating a physical anchor binding the performer to Orlando and each other. Through the discovery of the ring, the ensemble found a way to transform a spontaneous gesture into a ceremony that shaped the entire production’s vocabulary.
As the performers discovered more and more about the world they were creating, more and more joy was extracted from rehearsal, synthesizing both the “discovery-driven” and “joy-driven” approaches into the rehearsal process that guided the cast into a more comprehensive understanding of the play. With these realizations, the actors became more deeply woven into the story. The joy found by each actor through his or her individual discoveries added a layer of personal meaning to his or her work. As the actors became more ingrained within the work, they embodied it more completely, enhancing their production with pieces of their own identity while still being mindful of the qualities they are portraying. The performers surpassed merely playing their parts by fully embodying the story, its beliefs, characters, and emotional subtleties. Presenting the audience with an authentic and deeply personal experience, “Orlando” was resonant and relatable.
By embracing all parts of the process and themselves, the Acting Capstone company was able to devise a work of art emblematic of the fluidity of Orlando, gender, and the self in a modern world. Through a playmaking process as flexible as gender itself, the artists expressed that change is not something to be repressed, but something to explore and discover within our world and ourselves. By embracing intuition, the joy in discovery, and curiosity, the seniors’ production of “Orlando” demonstrated how transformation becomes a means of creation. By allowing the story to evolve alongside actors, the company’s dynamic process illustrated a world where gender, self, and story are always in motion as an ongoing method of being.
