Gender rolling

“All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn … for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.” Thus wrote Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, her treatise on the value of feminine intelligence and creativity.

The Rover is Behn’s best-known play, and it’s a bawdy, costume-laden Restoration-era comedy of epic proportions, filling three hours with the amorous adventures of love- (and lust-) craving youth. The action takes place during Carnival in Naples, Italy, in the 1600s, and the multiple plot lines involve the romantic intrigues of a group of banished English cavaliers, a pair of young Spanish noblewomen and their families and servants, “a famous courtesan,” and a gypsy prostitute.

Sumptuously staged on a vine-draped, multilevel stage—with a bare-breasted, ringlet haired bathing beauty painted into the scenery to overlook the audience and action—in Chico State’s Harlen Adams Theatre, the university’s production opens with the sisters, Florinda (Allie Griffey) and Hellena (Jessica Messineo) discussing their own romantic travails. Florinda is trying to avoid marriage to her father’s choice, a rich old nobleman whom she finds repulsive, and Hellena is determined to escape from the convent her father placed her in, a fate that she decries with this self-evaluation: “Prithee tell me, what dost thou see about me that is unfit for love—have not I a world of youth? A humor gay? A beauty passable? A vigour desirable? Well shap’d? Clean limb’d? Sweet breath’d? And sense enough to know how all these ought to be employ’d to the best advantage: Yes, I do and will.”

This air of feminine self-worth and independence is what gives the play much of its staying power. The female characters are strong-willed, witty and conscious of the roles—nun, wife, prostitute—that are lined out for them in the patriarchal society they are embedded in, and they rebel against those restrictions. Counterpoint to the women, the male characters represent an adherence to both societal norms and the greater sexual freedom that men are allowed simply because they are men.

Representing the more prosaic side of life, naïve but conniving English fop Blunt (Steven Sprague), loses much of his wealth (and even his clothes) to the “Mistress of Revels,” Lucetta (Sylvia Lopez), who is actually a gypsy prostitute who cons him into believing she is offering a romantic liaison when actually she is luring him to be robbed.

The titular character, Willmore “the Rover” (Xander Ritchey), is a seafaring libertine who pursues both the “pure” but lustful Hellena and the courtesan Angelica Bianca (Danielle Gervais) with equal ardency. And he wins them both through application of his domineering charm, but not before he also exposes his inner beast by nearly raping Florinda while drunk. His friend and foil, Colonel Belville (James Groh), is much more a true gentleman, whose love for Hellena’s sister Florinda blossomed when he protected her from harm during a siege in Pamplona. In the end, Belville’s constancy pays off for him just as inconstancy pays off for Willmore.

With a cast of 18 in multiple costumes and disguises, many subplots, sword fights and intrigues, and a wit-fueled text by a proto-feminist writer who became one of the first professional writers for the English stage, The Rover is a great choice for the university’s theater department. Under the direction of Katie Whitlock the opening night performance fairly sparkled with energy, and its themes of youthful rebellion, love, lust, courtship and marriage resonated with questions of gender roles and privilege that ring as true in this age as they did when it was written.