Vinora Epp and Steven Epp Photo by Arin Sang-Urai

"I am sixty five years old, and death is in love with me."

Back in 1928, Virginia Woolf chose to subtitle her fictional fantasy "Orlando" as a biography, chronicling the life of an Elizabethan boy who lives for hundreds of years and, somewhere along the way, metamorphosizes into a woman.

Inspired by "Orlando" and other Woolf writings, the daughter and father combo of Vinora Epp (who directs) and Steven Epp have co-authored and appear as themselves in a very personal stage piece, Orlando: A Rhapsody, which uses the 20th century novelist's fluid concepts of gender and time to look at their own loving relationship and intergenerational tradition of theatrical storytelling.

"Don't rub your lips from side to side, but blot them, like this," the father instructs his child, teaching her the proper way to apply makeup.

In his 25 years as co-artistic director of Minneapolis' now-closed Theatre de la Jeune Lune, a Tony-honored regional theatre company founded in France, the elder Epp's daughter was a familiar sight backstage.

"There must be something that happens to a child's brain when they grow up in a theater," observes Vinora, "because they live in a world where the adults themselves are inventing a different reality."

She describes how, at age seven, she became enamored with Hamlet while watching her father play the role.

"I didn't understand the plot, but I understood, I think, many of the feelings."

And while she has yet to fulfill her ambition to play Shakespeare's tormented prince, she has found what she regards as a very similar fictional soul in Woolf's title character. So she binds her chest and applies a light moustache above her lip to portray the youthful Orlando, while her father is assigned to play the ageless character as if Orlando did age the conventional way.

As indicated by the title, their one-act piece doesn't have a dramatic throughline, but is rather a rhapsodic expression of their bond through their art, as the younger sets out to shape her identity while the older looks back at past identities he has outgrown.

A major reference point is Woolf's multi-chaptered essay "A Room Of One's Own," wherein the author imagines how a sister of William Shakespeare, though born of the same family and possessing the same creative gifts, would have no outlet for literary expression because of societal restrictions and expectations.

"I don't think feminism is about women in the biological sense," Vinora explains to Steven, "Feminism has always been about questioning what a woman is." She credits Woolf for being "one of the first to point out that 'woman' is a sort of fiction unto itself."

This, of course, is a topic that has been pushed into the political forefront in recent years, but I'd hesitate to call Orlando: A Rhapsody a political piece meant to comment on current events. Instead, it's a mutually supportive exploration of dealing with societal norms in a profession that demands exploring yourself beyond traditional boundaries.

And it's so refreshing to see a fully functional family dynamic taking center stage these days.