Faculty at Home: Cláudio Medeiros

Please join Cláudio Medeiros, Professor of Theatre & Department Chair, for a talk entitled “We Are Not Afraid of Gender: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando at Middlebury.”

Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, published in 1928, was the author’s most popular novel during her lifetime. She wrote it as a tribute to her longtime lesbian partner, Vita Sackville-West. Vita’s interest in crossdressing most likely inspired Orlando’s change of gender halfway through the novel. Vita’s son described it as “the longest and most charming love letter in literature.” Unlike Woolf’s other works, Orlando is comic and whimsical. In the spring of 2024, Theatre professor Cláudio Medeiros brought American playwright Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation of the novel to Wright Theatre with a group of talented young actors. Medeiros joins us to talk about why he chose to work on this play with students in 2024, to give us a glimpse of the rehearsal process, and to share some of the images of the stunning production that Middlebury’s Theatre Department proudly put on stage.

Cláudio Medeiros ’90 is a professor of theatre and the current chair of the Theatre Department at Middlebury. Some of the classes he teaches include 20th/21st-Century Performance Aesthetics, U.S. Queer Drama, and Theatre History. He has directed a wide range of plays while at Middlebury: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Cabaret, Spring Awakening, Hecuba, and Lotus Lives: A Multimedia Chamber Opera, to name a few. He is currently putting the final touches on a translated collection of plays by Argentinian playwright Griselda Gambaro; they will be published by the Modern Humanities Research Association in the UK. Medeiros holds a PhD in theatre from the University of California, Berkeley.

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Sponsored by Faculty at Home.