The Rover

by Aphra Behn
Directed by Adriana Baer
September 6

Man and woman. Nun and courtesan. The Rover shocked audiences at its 1677 premier and promises to provoke today’s audiences just as fully. Aphra Behn, the first published female playwright, creates a vivid, humorous, and often poignant world where essential maleness challenges and is challenged by essential femaleness. Through timeless stage devices still effective today, Behn forces her audience to examine not only how gender is defined onstage, but how it is defined in their own world. Through an elaborate and quintessentially Restoration framing, the world of conqueror, lover, trickster, and indeed, of rover, come together in a sometimes beautiful, sometimes violent clash of personalities and desires.