Or,

“There is no sinner like a young saint,” quoth Aphra Behn, and so this earliest of published lady-playwrights made her raucous preparations for heaven. Little knowing she would someday become a Theater 101 requirement, Behn led a rollicking life spying for England’s Charles II, indulging her fierce sexual appetite and enjoying runaway 17th-century theatrical success. In the insouciant farce Or, (the title winks at double-barreled titles then and now), Liz Duffy Adams imagines Behn (Siff) mewed up in debtor’s prison, raring to trade espionage for the stage. Adams then pelts her heroine with a lifetime of complications: Masked men (always Paris) whizz through our hero’s chambers, as chambermaids and divas (always Hutchinson) vie for her attention. When events accelerate, so does Behn—she has no trouble satisfying a drove of lovers and her producers, too.

For much of Or, Adams and director Wendy McClellan effectively juggle the ridiculous (the designers deliberately conflate the 1660s with the 1960s) and the sublime. Adams can write mock-Restoration-style nonsense that positively ripples—in the prologue she promises to “show a vast unsettled world within/that open o and nosing thrust of r”—though as a farceur, she has less success at getting multitasking actors into cupboards and out of costumes. Unfortunately, therefore, the play attains headlong speed, but never the element of surprise. Luckily, Siff’s Behn reposes catlike in the center of the maelstrom, exuding predatory zing even when her prey (usually the underwhelming Hutchinson) doesn’t zing back. Paris, however, occasionally gives Siff worthwhile competition. When he tosses his dreamboat-wig over his shoulder and bends her backward for a clinch, it’s the whole front row that sighs.—Helen Shaw

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