More comic bodice-ripper than feminist tract, Liz Duffy Adams' sprightly farce Or,, at the Women's Project, perfectly suits its inspiration, the 17th-century playwright and poetess Aphra Behn. A pioneer in her day -- she was among the first Englishwomen to earn a living by her pen -- Behn never shied from sensationalism in her life or her work. Her anything-goes approach, along with her eagerness to embrace the full spectrum of sexuality, would one day endear her to the counterculturalists of the 1960s much as it did her post-Puritan contemporaries.

Adams' text -- enhanced by Wendy McClellan's energetic direction -- toggles adroitly between the 1660s and the 1960s, and between the formaliti[...]