About sex swapping woman to play men in plays.
I can’t see your username - whoever asked why I had said this was like saying only gender mattered, not sex - without going off the page.
I suppose the reason that Elizabethans used male actors for female roles was out of necessity. So, in the plays you mentioned, someone thought it would be interesting to try that the other way round.
I have not seen the plays you brought up so of course I cannot be sure. It seems an interesting experiment in its own right, but seems an odd thing to interpret a play written and imagined to portray a man and his thoughts by using a female person.
I can see it could be revealing through the incongruity or unsettling effect, but do not think this is, as it were, just an actor doing their job, so they can play any part if they are a good actor; it doesn’t matter what sex they are as long as they portray the character well. In theory that is right but males and females are too different in their physical presence for that to make sense imo.
It is not the same as black actors portraying parts, say, set in a time where in reality there would not have been a black person being that character at that time. (Like it was in a recent lovely film of David Copperfield.) That is a bit like someone with brown hair instead of red hair playing a Celtic role, you soon don’t notice. Sex is more visceral, I think.