MICKALENE THOMAS ORLANDO NOW

The 1992 film adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando, starring Tilda Swinton in the title role, is a British period drama that begins during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I in the early 1600s. The queen, played prodigiously by Quentin Crisp, fancies a young, boyish, aristocratic poet, Orlando, and grants him the male privilege of estate ownership. The narrative travels progressively through more than three centuries of attitudes, politics, fashions, and, most remarkably, relationships between the sexes.

While the only appears once in Woolf’s work of fiction (in reference to Orlando’s “China robe of ambiguous gender”), the concept of gender is cast radically and rightly as a plaything in the film. Swinton, with delicate quietude and characteristic androgyny, evolves from man to woman in what she has called “a nonperformance.” Her———