Abstract: The play Orlando – Engel und Wartesäle (Orlando - Angels and Waiting Rooms) from the Berliner group Theater Thikwa deals with the human existential condition in the process of gender identities. In doing so, the performers on stage reveal a search for individuality and new beginnings that prevails in all situations.

Details: At the beginning of the play, eight people wake up on the floor amid confusing mountains of clothes. The search for an identity is immediately apparent, as everyone is looking for the right clothes for themselves (not just the right clothes to “fit in”). At first, all players try on supposedly female clothes, but later, they try on clothes traditionally identified as “male clothes.” Throughout the play, one performer using a microphone (as if it were an interview) asks individual performers what they understand by specific topics such as hormone treatment, different types of skirts, nudity, or skinning. The characters hang their clothes on hangers around the stage as if they were a fence, showing different pieces of clothing to one person. A fashion store scene is played while a customer asks if her dress is already there. The voice on the phone, however, sounds so traditionally “masculine” that it leads to the question about the gender identity of the other person. Then, the general question arises about what exactly “now” means and whether this term can be defined. In the piece, the performers mention once and again Virginia Woolf’s character Orlando, an Elizabethan writer, who in the 1928 novel suddenly appears transformed from a man into a woman. The transformation was difficult and painful in those days, but it has become easier today. To take up the theme of transformation, they show some changes in everyday life after a sex change: new carpets, furniture, moisturizing, and pants, among others. Then, a person sings in a high-pitched voice. Meanwhile, we hear some performers whispering from behind what it would be like to be a woman. This disruption becomes more distinctive when the performers push another person to sing. The song of this person interrupts their quarrels first with a high voice, then with a shallow voice. In the following, a lot has to do with gender stereotypes, where a man needs all hands – or even more – to fight and protect women, and a woman uses her hands only to move up and down her shirt straps. Then, it is about traditionally binary “female” attributes like purity, innocence, and modesty. After another song, where the performers narrate Orlando’s gender transition, it is stated that men do not want her anymore after the transformation and that women detest her. Nothing is like before for Orlando; it has not always been like this. Furthermore, the actors remove their coats, which function as metaphorical mediums of their skin/identity, and gradually put on transparent plastic dresses that symbolize their new skin. This raises the question of the possibility of non-binary and simultaneous gender identities. The fluctuation between femininity and masculinity takes an unusual twist. The three most frequent questions after a gender transformation are whether one regrets it, whether it hurts, and in which gender one feels more pleasure. Ultimately, through the changes in the plastic clothes/skins, everyone can individually represent, realize, and start over, singing for themselves and with no apparent order.