The Gut Girls
Sure, we have the much-loved guttural denizens of largely imaginary rural and urban hells, the eccentric individuals created by Sam Shepard and David Mamet. Frank Galati’s adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath was one of the more admirable mainstream experiments in interpreting working-class literature. August Wilson has extended earlier genres with his poetic histories of African-Americans, but he critiques racism, not classism. The best American playwright in this vein, Naomi Wallace, has found a loyal audience in England, not the States. Americans are reluctant to look honestly at the reality of the working class; we want to imagine that anyone can be president.
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Cultural resistance to the idea that social class is fixed results in plays that make heroes out of people who abandon their communities. Remarkable individuals rise up from dead-end jobs while the poorly educated hordes live in factory-owned row houses. We mourn victims who sink tragically into death, unable to compromise in the face of mediocrity. These morality tales focused on the individual reassure and inspire privileged audiences by teaching us to value the miraculous achievement of the one and devalue the strengths of collective identity.
But it is the uniformly strong cast that really animates the complexities of Daniels’s play. Though the five gut girls form a cohesive unit, their eccentricities and distinctions are deftly established by Maia Rosenfeld, Naomi Jackson, Cherise Silvestri, Elizabeth English, and Sarah Pace. Their performances are not only enthusiastic but precise and skillful: subtle gestures and glances create a web of complicated relationships within the group. The minutiae of the women’s changing identities as they shift from being gut girls to doing other kinds of work is beautifully realized.
