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The best comedy requires two major ingredients: truth and timing. Laughter delivers catharsis. Laughter makes us fall in love with what we’re viewing. It makes us gasp and scream from the audience when we believe the characters we’ve grown attached to are in mortal danger. Because truth and timing are also essential to thrillers. Stages’ world premiere production of Let. Her. Rip. painstakingly balances high comedy with high horror, crafting a show that belongs in the annals of modern theatrical classics.

“As a theater maker, that moment…when the audience was all like, ‘No!’ and they gasped, that’s what I live for, to create that kind of visceral response,” says Stages artistic director David Charles Livingston, who directed Let. Her. Rip.

Set in London’s Whitechapel in November 1888, the play uses the match women strikes, protests, and eventual unionization as well as the concurrent Jack the Ripper killings to comment on gender, race, class, police apathy, and the nuances of sex work. Playwright Maggie Lou Rader began penning Let. Her. Rip. after the 2020 death of Breonna Taylor, a Louisville EMT shot multiple times during a no-knock police raid. Her boyfriend believed the plainclothes officers were home intruders and she was killed in the crossfire. Two officers have since been convicted, and her family received a $2 million settlement for her wrongful death.

“When systems fail, women die, and then when they’re reexamined, the oppressed are not invited into the rooms where those things are examined,” Rader says. “It feels like a never-ending cycle of keeping the oppressed oppressed and keeping poor people poor and keeping women subservient and keeping people of color without means.”

Livingston first encountered Rader’s work while serving as the interim artistic director and director of play development at Utah Shakespeare Festival. Every year, USF selects two playwrights to come work directly with a dramaturge, actors, and directors for feedback on their submissions and an opportunity to make changes to get the piece production ready. Rader sent in a script during Livingston’s first year that wasn’t selected, but Let. Her. Rip. piqued his interest on the second attempt.

“This play immediately spoke to me, and I thought there were some interesting things about it,” he says. “I am very much an advocate for making sure that the perspectives of women and strong women’s voices are put into the world, and that we tell the history of people whose history has not been told enough. And this play did this.”

When Livingston moved to Houston last August to serve as Stages’ artistic director, he knew exactly which play he wanted to direct as his very first with the company. He invited Rader to visit from her home in Cincinnati, and she could make real-time changes to the script during the rehearsal process.

“It is a pleasure to be in rooms with collaborators like Derek, who I always know have the best interest of the play in mind, and my best interests, too, as an artist,” Rader says. “And it’s such a joy to have three smart, amazing actors in a room… If they can’t make something work, that’s on me. It’s an invitation to go back to the page and see how I can support the storytelling much better.”

The final results prove the sheer force of their combined talents and collaborative spirits. As shepherded by Livingston, actors Rachel Omotoso, Melissa Pritchett, and Skyler Sinclair bring out the best in one another just as much as they do for Rader’s words. Their connections to one another, in victory, in rage, and in despair, beget moments that remind us of how even when theater depicts fiction, it still provides such a deeply real experience.

During a beautifully impassioned and wholly absorbing monologue by Omotoso on opening night, expressing anger and frustration at feeling infantilized by the white women who love her, Sinclair’s eyes shone with blinked back tears. Pritchett proves herself a master of real-time reactions, too, infusing the show with a raucous, bawdy humor before and during its descent into a horror story.

It’s details like that, embracing natural reactions versus a slavish orthodoxy to the page and stage, that make the Let. Her. Rip. world premiere so essential to this theater season. One hopes it becomes essential to the theater scene on the whole, past the borders of Harris County. Such a timeless and timely script deserves to be seen and placed in the hands of gifted directors like Livingston and peerless performers like Omotoso, Pritchett, and Sinclair. It’s an unapologetically angry story in an era where none of us can afford to be complacent. And it’s a paean to the necessity of compassion and connection when it comes to surviving in the world’s margins.

“I think women have an incredible capacity for empathy and understanding and love. And so much of this play is that there’s so much love in that room,” Rader says. “There’s so much love for their friends. It’s all based in love.”