A Bend community theater is being forced to change the gender of a character in its current production — back to the way the character was originally written.

Since a Bend production of “9 to 5: The Musical” opened June 15 at Cascades Theatre in Bend, actress Natalie Kniola had been playing the role of Joe as a female.

However, in the script by Patricia Resnick, Joe is written as a man who develops a crush on one of the show’s principle characters. Audiences attending the final performances of Cascades Theatrical Company’s production of “9 to 5,” Thursday through Sunday, will notice a key change in junior accountant Joe: Though still portrayed by Kniola, Joe will be dressed, and addressed, as a man.

The change comes about at the request of Music Theatre International, the agency that licenses rights to the show.

At auditions in the spring, women turned out in droves hoping to land a role in the musical, which features music and lyrics by Dolly Parton.

In fact, there were so many qualified actresses, director Karen Sipes told The Bulletin earlier this month, “I’ve never seen so many women. … I could have cast the show three times over.”

Male actors, on the other hand, were in short supply for the show, in which three female office workers take revenge upon their sexist, egotistical, bigoted boss.

With such an abundance of women interested in doing the show, Sipes made the creative decision to have Kniola portray Joe as a woman rather than a man.

Enter Music Theatre International.

“Our representative from MTI got a hold of us,” said Howard Huskey, CTC’s business manager. “The problem is that in the contract, it says that we can’t change pronouns, and we can’t change gender, basically. … If a woman’s going to do a man’s role, they have to dress as a man, keep the name of the man and play the role as a man.”

Gender swapping is practically a tradition in theater, including during William Shakespeare’s Elizabethan day and age, when males portrayed the roles of both sexes on stage. In the modern era, if, say, a girls’ school wanted to do a production of “Damn Yankees,” it could — as long as it stayed true to the author’s intent by not changing gender or pronouns. Changes such as the one made to Joe’s gender require written consent from the authors and can take a while to get.

“When you do a show, you have to stick with the way it’s written, basically,” Sipes said. “I cast a woman in a man’s role, and so I had this vision that didn’t jibe with the vision of the author, and so I had to switch that back around.

“You can’t change the gender of the role,” Sipes added.

It would have been fine to cast a woman in a male role, she said, “as long as you keep the integrity of the script. Sometimes the director’s notion doesn’t jibe with what the author intended — and you have to stick with the integrity of the author’s script.”

A spokesperson for Music Theatre International could not be reached for comment.

— Reporter: 541-383-0349, djasper@bendbulletin.com