In Virginia Wolfe’s Orlando: A Biography (memorably made into a 1992 film by Sally Potter with Tilda Swinton in the title role), Orlando is an English nobleman and favoured pageboy to Queen Elizabeth I. Appointed by King Charles II as ambassador to Constantinople, it is there, at the age of about 30 and during a time of great civil unrest, that he falls into a long and deep sleep, and wakes to find he has metamorphosed into a woman. Without ageing perceptibly, Lady Orlando lives on through more than three centuries in many countries, participating in multiple significant historical moments.” Orlando has been described as “the longest and most charming love letter in literature” – to Virginia’s lover Vita Sackville-West.[i]

In Jessie Alsop’s autobiographical Orlando, co-created with director Jade Eriksen, Jessie grows up in a Catholic family in small-town Masterton and discovers she is attracted to girls. She takes off to the USA, joins the San Francisco Neo-Futurists, works on boats and returns home with Sasha, her wife, who eventually becomes pregnant with their IVF son. After being with Sasha through a long, tough labour at the NeoNatal intensive care unit of Wellington Hospital, Jessie and wakes up in an armchair to a salutation from a kindly nurse: “Happy Father’s Day.”

The TAHI brochure describes Orlando as a work in development “about parenting and progress, life, death and family.” In the BATS website promo, Jessie says: “Not unlike Virginia Woolf’s titular character it seems I have gone to bed a woman and awoken a man. I feel terrified and also elated. Freed from one set of rules, conned by another?” On the page that we pick up on entering the BATS Dome space, Jessie writes, “We are growing this work to contribute to important conversations about gender, expectation & the tired tropes we uphold consciously & unconsciously as a culture.”

When it comes to political theatre nothing works better, I believe. than sharing personal experiences from a truly lived life heightened with touches of poetic licence. In an amiably chatty fashion, Jessie starts by musing on ‘truth’. Virginia Wolfe’s take on it is on that page we’ve picked up: “If we think of truth as something of granite-like solidity and of personality as something of rainbow-like intangibility and reflect that the aim of biography is to weld those two into one seamless whole, we shall admit that the problem is a stiff one and we need not wonder if biographers for the most part failed to solve it.”

In the first of a number of direct interactions with her audience that align us to her story, Jessie asks us who grew up somewhere other than New Zealand and/or in a small town before placing her family in Masterton. She claims her first memory is as a foetus, hearing her Scottish father and loud mother from Wisconsin discuss possible names – which explains why her mother prayed for a girl.

On a sparse stage, a hanging lamp on a pully is creatively employed. Born in 1982, Jessie’s early years are characterised by things her father and brother taught her, and the influence of generations of Catholicism. She’s about 10 when they finally get a TV, and projected images of popular shows evoke her expanding horizons – not least when Queer Eye for the Straight Guy hits the screen in 2003. While her retrospective critique of its limitations puts that show in perspective, it has been the catalyst for her telling her parents she has a girlfriend.

Her brother’s way of showing his love when she suffers her first break-up, her interaction with a chap from the audience who admits to a certain skill, facts about sharks, and the value of singing and reading to children brings us to the moment we’re asked to write down, in the space provided, “the best thing(s) you learned from your father or a father figure” – then send it to the stage by paper dart.

Jessie sketches in her experiences in the US of A with a diverse range of women, a visit from her parents involving an awkward Dad-moment, her time on a boat with Sasha and the rules for survival therein … They leave when Trump is President. Sasha is oriented to life in small town NZ – and she becomes pregnant in 2018.

And so to the birth and transformative moment, made real by Jessie being given a bag of things a father needs in Neo-Natal ICU. This is where the advice flown in from the audience is first picked up at random and read out: an insightful, heart-warming and bonding exercise.

Communication with the New York Jewish father-in-law brings focus to cultural and religious as well as gender differences. A very funny anecdote emerges from little Max asking, “Where me come from?” The comments people make in public on encountering little Max are often cringe-worthy and lead to a very pertinent observation about statistics and the research they are based on. The question of how much education should be confined to gender sectors is neatly challenged with “Things my wife will teach our son.”

The writer/performer’s message on the paper most of us turned into darts is headed: THE FISH EAT THE SOFTEST PARTS FIRST (ORLANDO). It bemused me when I first read it – and now its meaning is clarified as Jessie shares an experience from her time on the boat in San Francisco; encountering her first dead body floating below the bridge. Her description is factual and dispassionate. We are left to contemplate the relevance of a dismissive Hemingway quote about taking refuge in domestic success, the roles of his many wives (and mothers of his children) in allowing him to focus on writing, and the fact that many more men than women jump (a statistic that’s not contested). And is there a connection between the behaviour of fish and what has been said about circumcision?

There is a lot to discover and contemplate beneath the comedically rippling surface of this very sociable account of Jessie’s life to date. As often happens, having enjoyed it greatly in the moment, I’ve appreciated more of its virtues by writing about it. Orlando is on again tonight and tomorrow and well worth catching.

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