Theatre Prometheus Roars Into Pride Month With The Roaring Girl
More than four hundred years before anyone coined the phrase, two Jacobean playwrights dreamed up a heroine who shrugged off nearly every rule their society set for women. That heroine is Moll Cutpurse, and she is at the swaggering center of The Roaring Girl, the comedy by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker now playing in a fresh, gender-liberated production from Theatre Prometheus at Spooky Action Theater. A company devoted to queer and feminist work, Prometheus has chosen this centuries-old script as its Pride Month offering, and the timing could hardly be sharper.
Moll wears men's clothing, carries a sword and knows how to use it, lives by her wits on the city's streets, answers to no one, and has no intention of marrying. Remarkably, she is not an invention. The character is drawn from Mary Frith, a real Londoner of the early seventeenth century who smoked in public, swore, brawled, dressed as she pleased, and became notorious for refusing every expectation of what a woman was supposed to be. Audiences of the original era would have recognized her instantly in the play's teasing title, a riff on the slang of the day for a rowdy troublemaker.
The plot that swirls around her is pure romantic farce. A young gentleman named Sebastian Wengrave is desperate to marry his beloved Mary Fitzallard, but his money-minded father judges her dowry too small and forbids the match. Sebastian hatches a scheme: he will pretend to court the scandalous Moll Cutpurse, gambling that the mere prospect of such a daughter-in-law will so horrify his father that the old man will gladly bless the original engagement instead. From that single deception spins a tangle of subplots, disguises, double-dealing servants, and gallants behaving badly.
Co-directors and co-adapters Sophia Menconi and Sarah Marie Wilson trimmed the original five acts down to a brisk, intermissionless run of roughly eighty minutes, developing the project through Theatre Prometheus's early-career director mentorship program, "Pitch Your Passion." Their staging leans hard into broad, physical comedy, with oversized gestures and exaggerated delivery wringing every laugh out of the antique text. The production's heartbeat is its gender-diverse, nonbinary, and trans-inclusive casting, which lets the story's questions about identity and convention land with contemporary force.
Jae K. Gee plays Moll with boisterous glee, bringing real heroics to a standout sword fight. Daniel Brody is a nimble, expressive Sebastian, and Ayanna Fowler appears both as his sweetheart Mary and, in a doubled turn, as the hapless would-be suitor Laxton. Erik Harrison anchors the older generation as the stubborn Sir Alexander Wengrave, while John Jones, Laura Artesi, and Liv Speck each take on multiple roles across the fast-moving evening.
The design world is a deliberate collision of past and present. August Henney's set drops vintage furniture, including a lavish pink satin sofa, into a graffiti-covered black-box realm hung with unexpected odds and ends. Regan A. McKay's costumes mix period pieces like breeches and tights with tattered denim, heavy boots, plaid, and studded black leather, landing somewhere between Renaissance fair and punk-rock counterculture. Molly Jane Brennan's lighting flashes and spotlights the action, Kiefer Cure's sound design pulses with feminist punk, and Julia Rabson Harris choreographs the brawls, swordplay, and assorted intimacies.
What makes the play worth pondering, beyond its comedy, is its window into the constraints placed on women and the way a figure who refuses to conform can unsettle some people while centering others. Moll's very existence is an act of resistance, and the production has an unmistakably good time breaking down the binary. It is also worth noting what the play declines to do: Moll is never punished, never repents, never dies, and never backs down. She remains, from first to last, gloriously herself.