Iron Age Theatre's "Empress of the Moon'

The mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, who designed the atomic bomb, once challenged the Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson to name something discovered by economists that was both true and non-trivial. The same question applies to the feminist themes stuffed into Chris Braak's Empress of the Moon, an intentionally distorted biopic based on the 17th-Century English dramatist Aphra Behn.

If you've never heard of Behn, you won't learn much about her from Braak. The program, at least, informs us that Behn was the first woman in history to earn her living as a writer. She also spied on the Dutch government for the British crown. Most of her life remains shrouded in mystery, leaving plenty of room for speculation.

Bumbling Mata Hari

But instead of delving into the remarkable story of a woman who wrote some of the most popular plays of her era, Braak blends the plots of Behn's novel Oroonoko and her comedy The Rover into a tedious vehicle for trotting out the typical tropes of feminist complaints against men.

The exposition-heavy first act finds Behn (Jennifer Hutten) in Suriname, where she may or may not have spied on the Dutch colonial government during the Second Anglo-Dutch War of 1665. Here she becomes a bumbling Mata Hari, undone not by her inability to carry out her duties but by her reluctance to prostitute herself in the service of the Crown.

Suriname's governor Lord Willoughby (Casey Conan) shows no such compunction in indulging either his lust or the male chauvinism that fuels it. As he tells us, "Men desire, explore and conquer," while women are the objects of desire and the things to be conquered. "A wife," explains a local minister who seeks to seduce Behn's sister, "must be molded in a certain way to ensure virtue." True then, maybe true now— but still trivial.

Prude vs. whore

Act II takes us to the Netherlands, where Behn, now disguised as a ma, (and now played by Jacqueline Holloway), attempts to con a philandering, wealthy Dutch merchant, who criticizes his spouse for fulfilling only the first half of the stereotypically desired wife: prude in public/whore in the bedroom. He'll gladly part with his money, provided Behn secures for him the favors of the famously particular prostitute Valeria (Laura McWater).

But Behn's— or Braak's— continual moralizing about the plight of women interferes. Valeria, Behn argues, suffers from low self-esteem and deserves better. Things end poorly, as Behn shows herself capable of inflicting psychological damage against her own gender— but only when acting as a man. Even though Behn boldly boasts of tricking Valeria "because I could," Braak's script absolves her of all responsibility because of Behn's position of relatively low power in a patriarchy.

In Act III, Behn/Braak unleashes the supposedly shocking revelation that men impose a patriarchy upon women because they fear a woman's sexuality. Is this an original insight or a line lifted from the freshman orientation handbook at Bryn Mawr?

Women playing men

Braak directed Empress as a first work for the Special Operations Executive, an experimental branch of Norristown's Iron Age Theatre. The staging succeeds as an experimental piece; during the firs two acts, a narrator (Lauren Kerstetter) looks on, commenting and questioning both the action and the actors (and, sometimes the playwright). In Act III, Kerstetter (as Behn) becomes the focus; once she's locked in a debtor's prison, we finally glimpse Behn the writer, explaining her plays and novels as devices through which she can break free of societal strictures.

Despite some emotionally deft performances, neither the play nor the production clarifies Braak's decision to cast only women, all of whom (except Holloway) struggle in the male roles. Snippets of songs, along with some sexually perverse dialogue and expertly choreographed sword fighting, break the tedium, but only temporarily.

As for Ulam's challenge to find something true and non-trivial in economics? Years later, Samuelson finally answered Ulam by pointing to David Ricardo's Theory of Comparative Advantage. Two hours after the opening curtain, by contrast, Behn exhorts all women to "seize their own stories." So Braak ends the play unsurprisingly by putting woman on a pedestal. We leave the theater unenlightened about what may be true and non-trivial about Behn or women in any era.