ABOUT THE AUTHOR and PLAYWRIGHT

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was a groundbreaking British novelist and essayist and a pioneering feminist at a time when women had just gained the right to vote in Great Britain and the United States and feminism seemed to be searching for its next incarnation. The year after she published Orlando (1928), her sixth novel, she released A Room of One’s Own (1929), a six-part essay that takes women's equality beyond the political to the personal and economic. Woolf advances the thesis that in order for women writers to have an equal chance to develop, they need a room of their own in which to write and an annual pension of £500 (roughly $55,000 in today’s money, about the median individual income in the United States). Woolf speculates about a hypothetical sister of Shakespeare with equal or greater talent and the crushing obstacles to her becoming anything like her acclaimed brother William and wonders what the world would need to be like in order not to miss the next Judith Shakespeare. Based on two public lectures she gave at women's colleges in 1928, these essays were produced on the heels of Orlando, providing a non-fictional perspective on many of the themes woven into the novel. A victim of lifelong depression, Woolf committed suicide by drowning herself in a river with a large stone in her pocket. Woolf's death is dramatized, and her novel Mrs. Dalloway given a contemporary take, in Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Hours (1998), which has been adapted as both a film (2002) and an opera (2022).

Sarah Ruhl (b. 1974) is an award-winning American playwright, author, essayist, and professor whose notable works include Pulitzer Prize finalists in 2005 (The Clean House) and 2010 (In the Next Room, or the vibrator play), and Passion Play (2005 Pen American Award). Orlando was first produced at Classic Stage Company in New York City in September 2010. In addition to Orlando, she has also adapted Eurydice. She currently teaches at Yale School of Drama. For more information, visit her Website at sarahruhlplaywright.com.