The Chicago Magazine article put these two shows in an article because they both show women playing 'traditionally male' roles and the title of the article suggests it will dig into why. My initial reaction was "Yay, some folks I know are getting some notice & some good press is being given to some issues I care about." Then I read the article and had a whole different set of reactions.
Some background...
All Girl Dracula is just what its name implies - an entire cast of females, telling a version of the Dracula story. The sex of the actor doesn't change the gender of the character (ie Harker is still a male character, even though Amy E Harmon is a female actor). In No Beast So Fierce, the story is of a male dominated world where one role traditionally played by a man was changed to be a female character and played by a female actor, the always amazing to watch, Katherine Keberlein.
As a counter point, the production of All Girl Dracula was less about pushing social norms with its cross-gender casting. Even though all the actors were female, male characters were still in the seat of power; female characters still had historically feminine characteristics of being 'proper'; male & female characters courted & married each other. This production, to me, was much more about the universality of human emotion and struggle. When the gender is uniform, it becomes a non-issue. We see that fear, love, doubt, anger, passion, weakness, obsession are all dealt with by everyone and the way they are expressed crosses gender boundaries. An equally powerful use of theatre to create empathy, but different than Oracle's.
Another issue I had with the article, and this is purely personal, was how many theatre companies and recent productions in Chicago were NOT included in this explanation of "Why These Theatre Companies are Casting Women in Male Roles". Not sure if you've noticed, but I'm a member of Babes With Blades Theatre Company. We've produced 4 Shakespearean productions over the last 8 years that have all had an all-female cast. I've also had the pleasure of being cast in the role of E.K. Hornbeck in "Inherit The Wind" at Oak Park Festival Theatre (E. K. Hornbeck is based on H. L. Menken, the male newspaper writer of the early 20th century.) If I, personally, can come up with 2 additional examples, why couldn't the author of this article?
Obviously there's a lot of theatre going on in Chicago, and I would hope that a magazine of this caliber could find more than 2 companies to highlight when this issue is currently in the front of the minds of so many folks in our community.
(In fact, as I'm typing this, and flipping between windows on my screen, this article appeared in my facebook news feed. Proving again that facebook is becoming the best source of news...?)