Name: PANDORA'S BOX
SKU: ASC-621
Availability: InStock

Shop

PANDORA’S BOX

$5.40 – $15.00

A comic fantasy based on the life and work of Aphra Behn, the first professional woman playwright. Behn writes a play in which she is the heroine, Pandora. Her friends, the famous tragedian Elizabeth Barry and the notorious poet Lord Rochester, become characters who help Pandora in her quest to become a playhouse wit. A fast, funny, Restoration-style comedy. 10 speaking parts, but can use a number of non-speaking extras.

Form/Style: restoration-style comedy
Length in minutes: 120
Cast: 10 total
Roles: 4 female identifying, 6 male identifying
Cast age groups: 18+
Audience age: adult
Publisher: Australian Script Centre

MONOLOGUES
PRODUCTION HISTORY

You can preview the full online text with a Membership

Behn

Female | Unspecified | under 3 minutes
Starts on page 5

EXTRACT: Every one of these qualities, which it has been your fortune to naturally possess, I have struggled for daily, in a sphere which I alone inhabit, watched by those of either sex, who believed me a whore because I dared covet fame, as they coveted the contents of the Privy Purse. Never to enter a room but to be scorned for the audacity of my pen - my 'masculine' part, tho' the thing called mind, which guides the pen, I am sure, be an organ not of one sex or another.

Mrs Behn

Female | Unspecified | under 3 minutes
Starts on page 3

EXTRACT: Of many names is Mistress Aphra known,/ 'Whore', 'Jezebel' and 'Punk', all are one./ And if with 'Playwright',' Author' in their stead,/'Twill be most grave, for she'll be dead./ For this 'whore' Behn, writes for her bread./And only with grinning death's embrace,/ Will critic and wit feign reverent grace.

PLEASE NOTE: You will be directed to AusStage.edu.au for search results; Australian Plays Transform is not responsible for their completeness. Refer to our terms of use.