Let. Her. Rip at Stages Tells the Stories of Jack the Ripper With the Women Working in Match Factories

Any story about Jack the Ripper is all right by me. But conflating it with the London Matchstick Workers Strike of 1888 is true fiction.

Playwright Maggie Lou Rader tries her damnedest to put these two historic events into the same frame in this world premiere of Let. Her. Rip , now on stage at Houston's Stages theater, but the true facts get squeezed to bursting. Yes, these three women “matchgirls” (Rachel Omotoso as Nana; Melissa Pritchett as Liza; Skyler Sinclair as Em) might have known the women who were so brutally mutilated in late August through November in the slums of Whitechapel, 1888, but if Rader had delved a bit deeper, she might have smoothed out the rough edges and given her play a more accurate touch.

The Industrial Revolution, while it changed the world forever, wasn