Stage Dive: An Orlando Without Heat or Humidity

    * 9/27/10 at 6:45 PM

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/09/stage_dive_an_orlando_without.html

It takes Orlando, Virginia Woolf's benign Dorian Gray, the better part of half a millennium to finish a poem — but less than two hours to convince us that immortality and androgyny are a lot less fun than they look in vampire movies. That, I'm afraid, is the takeaway from Sarah Ruhl's dainty, evanescent adaptation at Classic Stage Company of Orlando, Woolf's gender-bending, epoch-hopping, mock-biography best known to mass audiences via its 1992 film incarnation (with the dashing Tilda Swinton as the title androgyne). Although based on a book written in and about sheer ecstasy, a literary swan dive into the transgressive, trans-temporal, trans-everything swirlings of art, love, lust, and mortality, the stage version sedulously filters out all arousal. There's no wanton gap between this Orlando's front teeth; its skin is cool as marble, free of any carnal tingle. Sex is had, or rather danced, but in the most sexlessly academic minuet imaginable: Annie-B Parson's ordinarily pugnacious choreography here congeals into something strangely restrained and overceremonious. The show, in spirit, might've been subtitled "The 500-Year-Old Virgin."