People can be like empty bottles, holding whatever messages they receive. Repeated enough, those messages—you’re pretty, you’re easy, you’re disposable—fill up the inside, leaving no room for anything new. That is, until you break the bottle. This metaphor is at the center of The Pliant Girls, a Greek-ish drama receiving a nimble and provocative production by Theatre Prometheus in association with Nu Sass Productions through Nov. 9.       

Adapted from Aeschylus’ “The Suppliants” by Meghan Brown, The Pliant Girls tells the plight of 50 sisters who face 50 arranged marriages with 50 brothers through a series of monologues, flashbacks, and choral odes. Brown’s script, infused with a modern spirit and vocabulary, presents a sample size of five sisters, each burdened by a single adjective: Courtney (Emma Wesslund) is the smart one, Leta (Mollie Greenberg) is the funny one, Philomena (Madeline Marie) is the pretty one, Arianna (Caleigh Riordan Davis) is the young one, and Kay (Alex Aspiazu) is the leftover. Or maybe the brave one.  

Each actor brings their role to full, layered life as the characters prove to be more than their labels. Over the course of the play, they are chosen, courted, misunderstood, and abused, until they decide to rewrite the plot with freeing though fatal results. While the story’s timeline isn’t crystal clear—particularly how the ending relates to the beginning—the actors’ performances anchor the production. 

The five representative brothers are deliberately less nuanced, though Seth Rosenke brings a particularly painful smile as the chemical-dependent suitor Alexander. Max Johnson chills as the misogynist wolf Dean.  

As Greek(ish) dramas do, the show raises multiple moral and political dilemmas: gender roles and gender inequality; the sacrifices conformity requires; mental health issues including anxiety and negative self-image; substance abuse; the fraught status of those seeking refuge; and how the needs of one conflict with the needs of the many.  

For the weight of its themes, The Pliant Girls is notably balanced and buoyant. Director Ileana Blustein and her cast find humor and joy throughout the play, from a grotesque five-headed patriarch to the quirky but genuine romance between Leta and Kem (Jordan Brown), an affably nervy overthinker. And Blustein sculpts beautiful stage pictures, arranging her actors with the grace and precision of a marble frieze. Some of the choral moments and transitions are a little stagey—a pitfall in a play with classic theater bones—but the shifts in tone, from tender to terror, from love to loss, are razor-sharp. 

Set designer Simone Schneeberg assembles crates, cushions, and cabinets to create a plinth for each sister, who remain on stage nearly the entire show. Rough planks of wood span the back of the set—are they a wall or a ship, a boundary, or a new beginning? Hailey LaRoe’s moody, atmospheric lights (assisted by Daelyn Funk) and Lex Allenbaugh’s eclectic sound design, full of lapping waves, classical strings, and pealing electric guitars, aid the production’s tonal shifts. Customer Charlie Vankirk dresses the sisters in wedding gowns from across the millennia.     

The Pliant Girls is kin with a recent spate of Greek myths retold from their overlooked women’s point of view. Authors such as Margaret Atwood, Pat Barker, Madeline Miller, and Natalie Haynes have given voice to silenced wives, witches, and warriors. Signature Theatre’s stunning Penelope in April 2024 showed how Odysseus’ long-suffering wife wasn’t simply sitting around awaiting his return. 

All these retellings urgently expose the dangers of writing someone else’s story or letting someone write your own, as well as the release that comes from letting go of stories that are no longer, or never were, yours.    

Produced by Theatre Prometheus in association with Nu Sass Productions, The Pliant Girls, written by Meghan Brown and directed by Ileana Blustein, runs through Nov. 9 at the Montgomery College Cultural Arts Center. nusass.com. $10–$30, with a Pay What You Can option. Masks are required, but also provided, at every performance.