THE PLAYWRIGHT
The masterminds behind the text.
CONTENT WARNING!
The following portion of this website contains topics of the following: Suicide, Depression, Mental Illness, Sexual Assault
Please read at your pace/discretion.
WHO WAS VIRGINIA WOOLF?
Adeline Virginia Stephen was born on January 25th, 1882, in London, England. She had the definition of ideal Victorian parents. Her father was Sir Leslie Stephen, an esteemed essayist, literary figure, and the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. Her mother was Julia Prinsep Duckworth Stephen. She was a woman with great self-sacrifice, helped nurse the ill, and had great social connections to prominent artistic figures. One of these figures included Julia Margaret Cameron, her aunt and one of the greatest portrait photographers of the 19th Century.
Both of Virginia's parents were previously widowed and had children with their previous spouses before their marriage. Laura (1870-1945) was the daughter of Leslie Stephen's first wife. Harriet Thackery (1840-1875), George (1870-1937), and Stella Duckworth (1869-1897) were the children of Prinsep Stephen and her previous husband. Leslie and Prinsep would have four more children together. Virginia, Vanessa (1879-1961), and her brothers Thoby (1880-1906) and Adrian (1883-1948). They all lived in a respectable English middle class neighborhood in Kensington.
Virginia's early childhood would consist of writing a family newspaper, the Hyde Park Gate News, where she would often tease her siblings Vanessa and Adrian. Virginia's childhood would be structured in opposites: city and country, winter and summer, repression and freedom, fragmentation and wholeness, from traveling from London to their disheveled house on Cornwall coast.
In May 1985, Virginia's mother would pass away from rheumatic fever at age 49. Virginia was 13 years old. She would discontinue writing her amusing accounts of family news. A year would pass before she would write a happy, cheerful letter to her brother Thoby. She would be just recovering from depression when her half-sister Stella Duckworth would die at age 28. Then, in 1904, her father would pass away in 1904. Virginia first attempted suicide and became institutionalized. Thoby would then pass away from typhoid fever in 1906 at age 26. Thoby's death had such an impact on Virginia that Thoby would later be re-imagined as Jacob in her first experimental novel Jacob's Room and later as Percival in The Waves. These would be the first of many mental collapses of Virginia's life.
Virginia Woolf is best explained as "a sane woman who had an illness" by biographer Hermoine Lee. Her 'madness' would be provoked by life-altering events, notably family deaths, her marriage, or the publication of a novel. According to Hermione Lee, Woolf's symptoms were similar to a manic-depressive illness, or bipolar disorder. Leonard, Victoria's lifelong companion, documented her illness. He categorized her breakdowns into two stages:
“In the manic stage she was extremely excited; the mind race; she talked volubly and, at the height of the attach, incoherently; she had delusions and heard voices…she was violent with her nurses. In her third attack, which began in 1914, this stage lasted for several months and ended by her falling into a coma for two days. During the depressive stage all her thoughts and emotions were the exact opposite of what they had been in the manic stage. She was in the depths of melancholia and despair; she scarcely spoke; refused to eat; refused to believe that she was ill and insisted that her condition was due to her own guilt; at the height of this stage she tried to commit suicide.”- Leonard Woolf
During Virignia's life, she would consult at least twelve doctors. She would experience the emerging medical trends for treating the insane from the Victorian era to World War I. Woolf would incorporate the language of medicine into her novel Mrs. Dalloway. When Woolf prepared to write Mrs. Dalloway, she envisioned it as a 'study of insanity and suicide; the world seen by the sane and insane side by side.'
Virginia would begin to teach English literature and history in an adult-education college in London. She would also write articles and reviews for publications that would include The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, and The National Review. It would be also during this time that she would be come close friends with young men who shared her interests, a majority of these friends her brother Thoby met at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1899. These friends would include Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, and Clive Bell. They would become the unofficial 'Bloomsbury Group'.
In 1908, Virginia was determined to 'reform' the novel by creating a holistic form of embracing aspects of life that were 'fugitive' from the Victorian novel. She would experiment with such a novel called Melymbrosia. Virginia would then be introduced to the radical European art, intrigued by borrowing from the likes of artists like Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso.
Virginia saw a lot of disparity in her own parents' marriage. She was determined that 'the man she married would be as worthy of her as she of him. They were to be equal partners.' She had numerous marriage proposals. Virginia hesitated with Leonard Woolf, partly due to her fear of marriage and the emotional and sexual involvement the partnership would require. Virginia would write to Leaonard the following:
“As I told you brutally the other day, I feel no physical attraction in you. There are moments—when you kissed me the other day was one—when I feel no more than a rock. And yet your caring for me as you do almost overwhelms me. It is so real, and so strange.” - Virginia Woolf
Leonard and Virginia would marry in August of 1912. Virginia would be 30 years old. They would share the same bed for two or three years. But, with Virginia's unstable mental health, they followed the suggested medical advice and didn't have any children.
Not only was there the problems of unequal marriage status, but there was also the lack of chastity in a woman. Virginia would narrate that she was a victim of some kind of sexual abuse by the hands of one of her half-brothers in her memoir Moments of Being. Virginia was highly conscious of the ways that men had access to the knowledge of sex and that women of middle and upper class were supposed to be ignorant of it. She would puzzle the thought of literature that would treat sexuality and especially the sexual life of women frankly, but her own works discuss sex indirectly.
Between 1910 and 1915, Virginia's mental health was rocky. But, she would completely recast Melymbrosia as The Voyage Out in 1913. She would base many of the characters on real-life prototypes like her father, her siblings, and even herself. In this novel, Rachel Vinrace (the main character) is a sheltered young woman who, on an excursion to South America, is introduced to freedom and sexuality (through from the novel's inception she was to die before marrying). Rachel contracts a terrible illness that plunges her into delirium and then death. Rachel's voyage into the unknown began Virginia's voyage beyond the conventions of realism.
Virginia's depressive worries that she was a failure as a writer and a woman would provoke a second suicide attempt in September of 1913. The publication of The Voyage Out would be delayed until 1915. In April of 1915, she would sink into a distressed state where she would often be delirious. She would overcome her 'vile imaginations' that threatened her sanity later that year. She would keep her depression mostly at bay for the rest of her life.
In 1917, Virginia would buy a printing press and would found the Hogarth Press, named for the Hogarth House (their home in the London suburbs). Virginia and Leonard would publish their own Two Stories in 1917, which would contain Leonard's Three Jews and Virginia's The Mark.
Virginia wanted to prove that she could master the traditional form of the novel before breaking it. So, she plotted her next novel in two romantic triangles, with its protagonist in both. She would write Night and Day in 1919 which would answer Leonard's The Wise Virgins. In this story, Leonard had his self-like protagonist lose the Virginia-like beloved and end up in a conventional marriage. In Night and Day, the Leonard-like Ralph would learn to value Katharine for herself, not as some superior being. Katherine would overcome class and familial prejudices to marry Ralph. The novel would focus on realistic descriptions on early 20th century settings and issues such as class, politics, and suffrage.
In 1921, Woolf would begin a new novel written in blocks to be surrounded by white spaces. In "On Reading Novels" (1922), Virginia would argue that the novel was not so much a form as an 'emotion in which you feel'. She would achieve this in her novel Jacob's Room, transforming her personal grief over the death of Thoby into a 'spiritual shape'. She takes Jacob from childhood to his early death in war, she leaves out plot, conflict, and even character. The emptiness of Jacob's room and the irrelevance of his belongings would convey in their minimalism the emptiness of loss. Jacob's Room is an antiwar novel, Virginia would fear that she ventured to far beyond representation.
In the beginning of 1924, the aristocratic Vita Sackville-West would begin to court Virginia, a relationship that would blossom and bloom into a lesbian affair. This would be the deepest relationship that Virginia would ever have outside of her family. The two of them were more different than alike. But, their differences were all a part of the attraction. Virginia found Vita irresistible with her glamour and aristocratic demeanor. Virginia stated the following of her feelings about Vita: Virginia had already written a story about Mrs. Dalloway. She thought of a device that would pair a highly sensitive woman with a shell-shocked war victim so that 'the sane and the insane' would exist 'side by side'. Virginia would also give a speech called 'Character in Fiction' where she would attack 'materialist' novelists for not including the essence of character.
Virginia would try to account for what was new about 'modern' fiction. She would write that, while all fiction tried to express human character, modern fiction had to describe character in a new way because 'human character changed'. In her novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925), the doctors presume to understand personality, but the essence of personality evades them. The novel would be patterned as a Post-Impressionistic painting. The reader can trace the characters Clarissa and Septimus' movements through the streets of London. At the end of the day, Clarissa gives a grand party and Septimus commits suicide. Their lives would come together when the doctor who was treating Septimus arrives at Clarissa's party with the news of his death.
“A real woman. Then there is some voluptuousness about her; the grapes are ripe; & not reflective. No. In brain & insight she is not as highly organised as I am. But then she is aware of this, & so lavishes on me the maternal protection which, for some reason, is what I have always wished from everyone.” - Virginia Woolf
Both Virginia and Vita avoided categorizing their relationship as lesbian. Vita rejected the lesbian political identity and, even, Virginia's feminism. Vita was well-known in her social circles as a 'Sapphist'.
Virginia had already written a story about Mrs. Dalloway. She thought of a device that would pair a highly sensitive woman with a shell-shocked war victim so that 'the sane and the insane' would exist 'side by side'. Virginia would also give a speech called 'Character in Fiction' where she would attack 'materialist' novelists for not including the essence of character.
Virginia would try to account for what was new about 'modern' fiction. She would write that, while all fiction tried to express human character, modern fiction had to describe character in a new way because 'human character changed'. In her novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925), the doctors presume to understand personality, but the essence of personality evades them. The novel would be patterned as a Post-Impressionistic painting. The reader can trace the characters Clarissa and Septimus' movements through the streets of London. At the end of the day, Clarissa gives a grand party and Septimus commits suicide. Their lives would come together when the doctor who was treating Septimus arrives at Clarissa's party with the news of his death.
In 1927, Virginia wanted to build on her success that she achieved from Mrs. Dalloway. She would publish To the Lighthouse on May 5th, 1927. This novel would break the narrative continuity into a tripartite structure. The first section 'The Window', begins as characters Mrs. Ramsay and her youngest son James sit in the French window of the Ramsay's summer home whilst house guest Lily Briscoe paints them. James begs to go to a nearby Lighthouse. Mr. Ramsay (inspired by Leslie Stephen) uses logil to diminish the hopes of going to the lighthouse. But, he needs sympathy from his wife. In the climax, during a dinner scene, Mrs. Ramsay inspires for such composure that the moment 'partook, she felt... of eternity'.
The middle section, 'Time Passes', would focus on the empty house during a 10-year-hiatus and the last-minute housecleaning for the returning of the Ramsay family. Described in this section is the progress of mold, weeds, dust, and gusts of wind. She describes major events like the death of Mrs. Ramsay and a son and daughter very minimally.
In the last section, 'The Lighthouse', Mr. Ramsay and his youngest children, James and Cam, Lily Briscoe, and others from 'The Window' back to the house. Mr. Ramsay and the children, now teenagers, reach the lighthouse in a moment of reconciliation. Lily Briscoe finishes her painting from the first section.
In this novel, Virginia would question women's equality with men in marriage. She would evoke these thoughts in the relationship of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, who would be based on her parents and the inequality of their marriage. Vanessa, Virginia's sister, immediately knew that Mrs. Ramsay was based on her mother. Vanessa would describe it as; "almost painful to have her so raised from the dead."
Virginia would write in two 1927 essays, 'The Art of Fiction' and 'The New Biography' that fiction writers should be less concerned with native notions of reality. They should be more concerned with language and design. She would argue that biographers should yoke the truth with imagination, 'granite-like solidity' with 'rainbow-like intangibility'. Virginia would try to reclaim Sackville-West through a ''biography' that would include Sackville family history. Thus, the story of Orlando was born.
Virginia would solve biographical, historical, and personal dilemmas through the story of Orlando. The character of Orlando would be directly based off of "Vita; only with a change about from one sex to another." Vita's physical appearance, to Virginia, both embodied the masculine and the feminine. She would write the following to Vita that Orlando was: Orlando begins writing poetry during the Renaissance, using history and mythology as models, and over the centuries returning to the poem 'The Oak Tree", revising it according to the shifting poetic conventions. Virginia writes in mock-heroic imitation of biographical styles that change over the same period of time. Orlando: A Biography (1928) would expose the artificiality of both gender and genre prescriptions. Orlando would also argue for a novelistic approach to a biography.
“All about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind.” - Virginia Woolf
Even though Virginia and Vita's affair lasted for about three years, Virginia would write Orlando as an 'elaborate love-letter, rendering Vita androgynous and immortal, transforming her story into a myth'. Virginia's idea of the androgynous mind would be extended in Orlando to an androgynous body.
Orlando begins writing poetry during the Renaissance, using history and mythology as models, and over the centuries returning to the poem 'The Oak Tree", revising it according to the shifting poetic conventions. Virginia writes in mock-heroic imitation of biographical styles that change over the same period of time. Orlando: A Biography (1928) would expose the artificiality of both gender and genre prescriptions. Orlando would also argue for a novelistic approach to a biography.
Upon the publishing of Orlando, it would immediately become a bestseller. Orlando would make Virginia Woolf one of the best-known contemporary writers.
Virginia would go on to write A Room of One's Own in 1929, blaming women's absence from history not on their lack of brains but on their poverty. This novel imagines the fate of William Shakespeare's sister Judith (his sister's name was actually Joan). She would be unable to access the all-male stage of England in the Elizabethan era or get any form of formal education. Judith would be forced to marry and abandon her literary gifts. Or, if she had chosen to run away from home,s he would have been driven to prostitution.
Virginia would study the history of women's education and employment. In her 1931 talk "Professions for Women", she would argue that the unequal opportunities for women would negatively affect all of society. She would urge women to destroy the 'angel in the house', a reference to Coventry Patmore's poem of that same title.
Virginia would then go on to her next mystic novel, The Waves (1931). She praised a 1930 exhibit of her sister Vanessa Bell's paintings for their wordlessness. The Waves would consist of poetic interludes that would describe the sea, sky, dawn, and dusk. Between the poetic interludes, voices of six named characters would appear in sections that move from their childhoods to old age.
In the middle section, the six friends meet in a farewell dinner for another friend leaving for India. The single flower at the center of the dinner table transforms into a 'seven-sided flower... a whole flower to which every eye brings its own contribution.' The novel describes the experiences how each individual experiences events, including the death of their friend, uniquely.
In the final section, one of the characters (Brenard) narrates this section. He defies death and a world 'without a self.' All the characters, even though they're all unique, become one and indistinguishable like the interludes in the beginning section.
Ever since her early days, Virginia longed for a holistic state beyond binary divisions. Before she finished The Waves, she complied a scrapbook of clippings that illustrated the horrors of war, the treat of fascism, and the oppression of women. Discrimination against women that would be discussed in A Room of One's Own would inspire her to plan a book that would involve tracing the story of a fictional family named Pargiter. This book would also explain the social conditions affecting the family members over a period of time. This would be named The Pargiters: A Novel-Essay. She would alternate between sections of fact and fiction. For the fictional sections, she would use experiences of friends and family from the Victorian Age in the 1930s. The task of moving between fact and fiction, for her, was daunting.
Woolf would take a break from The Paragiters to write a mock biography of Flush, the dog of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Flush (1933) would remain a biographical satire and lighthearted exploration of perception of a dog's.
Then, in 1935, Virginia would complete Freshwater. An absurdist drama based on the life of her great aunt Julia Margaret Cameron. It satirized the high-minded Victorian notions of art.
Virginia would never finish The Paragiters. The book was becoming too long alternating between different types of prose. She would solve some of the problems by disposing of the essay sections, keeping the family narrative, and renaming her book The Years. She would narrate 50 years of family history through the decline of class and patriarchal systems, the rise of feminism, and the threat of another war.
Virginia was desperate to finish the book. She lightened it with poetic echoes of gestures, objects, colors, and sounds with deletions. She cut explicit references to women's bodies. The book would describe the damage done to women and society over the years due to sexual repression, ignorance, and discrimination. Even though Virginia trimmed the book and removed much fo the book's radicalism, The Years became another best seller.
Roger Fry, a friend of Virginia's sister's Vanessa's family, would die in 1934. Virginia would become distressed and Vanessa would be devastated. Then, in July of 1937, Vanessa's elder son, Julian Bell, would be killed in the Spanish Civil War while driving an ambulance for the Republican army. Vanessa became so disconsolate that Virginia set aside her writing to comfort her. This would be the focus of Virginia's next writing: Three Guineas (1938). It would privately lament over Julian's death while also publicly be a diatribe against war.
Virginia would still be distressed by the recent deaths of Fry and Julian that she tired to test her theories of experimental, novelistic biographies in a life of Fry. While she was writing her Fry biography, she wrote a verse play about the history of English literature. Virginia's next novel would be Pointz Hall, which would be later retitled as Between the Acts. This novel would include a play as a pageant performed by villagers.
Virginia would take a break from Fry's biography. She would create a memoir called "A Sketch of the Past," which contained her mixed feelings towards her parents, past, and about memoir writing in itself. It would be here where the inappropriate touching and sexual assault by her older half brother Gerald would surface when she was around 4 to 5 years old.
In 1932, the Bloomsbury Group would disperse beginning with the death of Lytton Stratchey and the suicide of his long-time partner Dora Carrington shortly after. As her friends were dying, Virginia was feeling her own life starting to crumble. Virginia became severely depressed in January of 1941 during the rise of Adolf Hitler and the beginnings of World War II. This was also partially due to the strain of completing her novel Between the Acts, which she was writing during the bombing of London in 1940 and 1941. Her novel would threaten art and humanity itself. She would not believe the publisher's praises of the novel. She thought it was too slight and sketchy, that all writing was irrelevant when England was seemingly on the verge of invasion. She wanted to delay its publication, believing that it needed an extensive revision. But, Virginia felt that she lost her art. She felt that she could no longer write. If she could no longer write, she could no longer exist.
Virginia would express her feelings and reasonings for committing suicide in her final letter to her husband Leonard. She would write the following:
“I feel certain that I am going mad again: I feel we cant go through another of those terrible times. And I shant recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and cant concentrate.” - Virginia Woolf
A week later, Virginia would write the third of her suicide letters. She would then walk a half-mile to the River Ouse, filled her pockets with stones, and drown herself in the river.
Virginia's body would be found by some children a short way down-stream almost a month later on April 18th. The verdict of her death was 'suicide with the balance of her mind disturbed.' Her body would be cremated on April 21 with only her husband, Leonard, present. Her ashes would be buried under a great elm tree with the concluding words of The Waves as her epitaph:
“Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!”
The last words that Virginia Woolf wrote were "Will you destroy all my papers." To Leonard, it was unclear what papers he was meant to destroy. If Virginia wanted all of her unfinished works to be destroyed, he disregarded her wishes. He published her novel Between The Acts. He compiled significant diary entries into the volume The Writer's Diary. He carefully kept and preserved all of her manuscripts, diaries, letters, and preserved all of Virginia Woolf's voice in each of her written lines.
Want to learn more about Virginia Woolf? Check out these resources!
WHO IS SARAH RUHL?
Sarah Ruhl is an award-wining American playwright, essayist, author, and professor! She is the one who adapted Virginia Woolf's Orlando from page to the stage.
She is originally from Chicago, Illinois. She would receive her Bachelor of Fine Arts in English at Brown University and later go on to receive her M.F.A. in playwrighting. She would study with Paula Vogel, American Playwright and 1998 Pulitzer Prize winner for Drama for her play How I Learned to Drive (1997). Other works of Paula Vogel include The Baltimore Waltz (1992), And Baby Makes Seven (1993), Desmonda: A Play About a Handkerchief (1994), The Mineola Twins (1999), Hot 'N Throbbing (2000), The Long Christmas Ride Home (2004), and Indecent (2015).
Sarah would also spend a year of graduate work studying English literature at Pembroke College, Oxford. Sarah would then become an alum of 13P and of New Dramatists.
Sarah Rule would win a MacArthur Fellowship in 2006 and the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award in 2016. She would be the recipient of the PEN Center Award for a mid-career playwright, the Whiting Writers award, a Helen Merrill Award for Playwrighting, the Feminist Press' Forty under Forty award, and a Lilly Award.
Sarah would serve on the executive council of the Dramatist's Guild for three years. She is currently a part of the faculty at the Yale School of Drama.
Sarah Ruhl's plays would include Stage Kiss (2013), In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) (2010) - which would be a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a Tony Award nominee for best new play), The Clean House (2004) - which would be a Pulitzer Prize Finalist in 2005 and win a Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2004, Passion Play (2002) - Winner of a Pen American award and The Fourth Freedom Forum Playwrighting Award from The Kennedy Center), Dead Man's Cell Phone (2008) - Winner of a Helen Hayes Award), Melancholy Play (A Musical with Todd Almond) (2015), Eurydice (2003), Orlando (2010), Demeter in the City (2006) - An NACCP Nomination, Late: a cowboy song (2003), Three Sisters (2009), Dear Elizabeth (2012), and The Oldest Boy (2014).
Her most recent shows are For Peter Pan on her 70th Birthday (2016) and How To Transcend a Happy Marriage (2017).
Sarah Ruhl's shows have been produced on Broadway at the Lyceum by Lincoln Center Theatre, Off-Broadway at Playwright's Horizons, Second Stage, and at Lincoln Center's Mitzi Newhouse Theatre. Her plays have been produced all over the country. Premiers of her plays are often at Yale Repertory Theatre, the Goodman Theater, Berkeley Repertory Theater, and the Priven Theatre Workshop in Chicago.
Her plays have also been produced internationally and have been translated to over twelve language. Some of the languages include Polish, Russian, Spanish, Norwegian, Korean, German, and Arabic.
Sarah Ruhl has also written four books: Smile: The Story of a Face, Letters from Max: A Book of Friendship, 44 Poems for You, and 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write (a winner of Times Notable Book of the Year).
Sarah Ruhl currently lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their three children: Anne, William, and Hope.
Sarah describes the following about her work:
She tries to "interpret how people subjectively experience life… Everyone has a great, horrible opera inside him. I feel that my plays, in a way, are very old-fashioned. They’re pre-Freudian in the sense that the Greeks and Shakespeare worked with similar assumptions. Catharsis isn’t a wound being excavated from childhood.” - Sarah Ruhl
Want to learn more about Sarah Ruhl? Check out these resources!
PAST ORLANDO PRODUCTION HISTORY
Orlando was first produced at Classic Stage Company (Brian Kulick - Artistic Director, Jessica R Jenen - Executive Director) in New York City on September 8th, 2010. The people involved in this production were as follows:
Director - Rebecca Bayla Taichman
Choreography - Annie-B Parson
Set Design - Allen Moyer
Lighting Design - Christopher Akerlind
Costume Design - Anita Yavich
Music & Sound Design - Christian Frederickson and Ryan Rumery
Stage Manager - Erin Maureen
THE CAST:
Orlando - Francesca Faridany
Sasha - Annika Boras
Ensemble - David Greenspan, Tom Nelis and Howard Overshown
