Join the Department of Performing and Media Arts for Orlando’s Gift, a production by students, faculty, and guest artists, written and directed by PMA Professor David Feldshuh. This new play will have five performances in the Flexible Theatre, Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts:
Friday, November 1st, 7:30 p.m.
Saturday, November 2nd, 7:30 p.m.
Friday, November 8th, 7:30 p.m.
Saturday, November 9th, 2:00 p.m.
Saturday, November 9th, 7:30 p.m.
*While this event is fully reserved, we encourage you to come to the Schwartz on the day of show for the Wait List line. Our experience is that not all reservations for free tickets are redeemed.
*Please note that the opening night performance on Friday, November 1st, will be followed by a post-show discussion with Professor David Feldshuh and AD White Professor Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director of the Public Theater, followed by a reception sponsored by AD White Professor at the Large Program. The reception will be for the cast, crew, friends and audience members who stay for the discussion.
“Half laughing, half serious, with great splashes of exaggeration.” – Virginia Woolf
Orlando’s Gift is a new play inspired by the novel, Orlando, by Virginia Woolf. It tells the love story of writer, Virginia Woolf, and her hero/heroine Orlando, a character who has too many selves to count. Orlando lives forever in a giddy world of fantasy, wit, surprise and theatrical adventure. Author and character discover the power of words to celebrate life and the ecstasy of the imagination at work.
Content warning: This play contains discussions of sexual assault, death and suicidal ideation.
Listen to PMA Podcast Episode 62 - Orlando's Gift
Feldshuh, whose 1992 play “Miss Evers Boys” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, spoke about the genesis of the idea: “I was introduced to Virginia Woolf’s novel “Orlando” more than four decades ago when I spent a long, hot summer on the second floor of an un-air-conditioned former warehouse in Minneapolis working through the book to transform and direct the story into a play for the Illusion Theater in Minneapolis.”
In 2023, a group of Cornell advanced acting students approached Feldshuh looking to participate in a new theatre project. “When these students came to me, “Orlando” popped back into my head and the impulse to revisit the book as an inspiration for a new play that puts Woolf into the story became an unrelenting tug on my imagination.”
“Feldshuh took them at their word and came back with some guidelines,” said Aoise Stratford, advising Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, lecturer in Performing and Media Arts, and dramaturg for “Orlando’s Gift.”
According to Feldshuh, the play would “have to be something physical and fantastical,” Stratford said. “The project would have to be wildly theatrical and require students to go on an artistic journey to somewhere totally unpredictable. It would have to be something new.”
“The combination of an author’s creative journey through ecstasy and hopelessness was an irresistible writing and directing challenge,” said Feldshuh. “Woolf was determined to promote her vision of a world in which each person is given room to choose from multiple identities throughout their lives,” said Feldshuh. This ethos can be felt in the casting for “Orlando’s Gift,” where many of the actors have a chance to play three or more roles.
Liv Licursi ’25, who is studying Industrial and Labor Relations, with a minor in Performing and Media Arts, and plays Sasha, Bartholomew, and Word in the play, spoke about Sasha, the Russian princess. “She is fiery, impulsive, and has a passion for living life in the moment, and she helps Orlando come to experience life in this way in their fleeting time together.”
These characters build on the spirit of Virginia Woolf’s original novel. “[In “Orlando,”] Woolf was energized by the challenge of bursting the boundaries of biography by combining fact and fiction in an unbridled writing adventure,” said Feldshuh.
The crew, comprised largely of Cornell students, had a major hand in helming this boundary-pushing production, an embodiment and evolution of the original novel. “Because Orlando’s Gift is a new play that has never been produced before, rehearsal is more accurately described as creation, as the director, cast, and designers discover the ways that Virginia Woolf’s and Orlando’s stories want to be told,” said Sarah Bewley ’27, Assistant Stage Manager, and a student in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering.
“Once the show opens,” said Bewley, “I’ll be running the backstage and ensuring coordination between the backstage crew, the dressers, and the many complex scene transitions and costume changes that have to occur. Working off of David Feldshuh’s original script, lines are added and taken away, blocking evolves, and scenery itself transforms in an iterative, collaborative process that captivates me every time,” she said.
Alexa Alfonsi, who is the Production Stage Manager in the Department of Performing Arts and the Stage Manager for “Orlando’s Gift” said: “I come from the world of film. When one says ‘copy’ they are binding themselves to the task that they have heard come down on the wire (the radio). It’s more than a promise. It’s a verbal contract, assuring the person that the task will be completed. To have a team that breeds a proper 'copy' can be truly remarkable. That’s our team. That's where our magic happens behind the scenes.”
For students, faculty, staff, and guest artists, this process has been a uniquely rewarding experience. “It means the world to me to be a part of this production,” Licursi said. “I have studied with David Feldshuh for over a year now, and to be able to work with him alongside my incredible peers in this capacity on a piece he has written is a gift like no other.”
Luke Leh ’25, a Computer Science major, who plays Archduchess, Archduke, and Word, is acting for the first time since he was 13. “[This is] the closest I've been to being on a professional set. It's a truly amazing opportunity to be a part of this amalgamation of minds to bring the words of David Feldshuh and Virginia Woolf to life in this play. I am extremely grateful to the writer, crew, and cast for this incredible experience, and for our loved ones' continuous support thus far.”
For Bewley, this production has been a chance “to be a witness to and archiver of the same imaginative, transformative writing process at the heart of the play. At the end of this production, the script will be a record of how David, the cast, and all the collaborators of the production have brought Orlando to life. I can’t wait to see it used to bring Orlando to life again and again.”
Feldshuh knows that the cast and crew has the opportunity to deliver something special with this play: “[Audiences can expect] fun and an appreciation for the brilliance of Woolf’s writing: comedy, farce, soaring poetry, memorable characters and the story of the immortal life-adventurer Orlando traveling an unpredictable journey with the creator/author Virginia Woolf. Two lives that come together in a love story that is a gift to them both: “Orlando’s Gift.”
