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he actors and tech crew (and audience) of The Gut Girls by Sarah Daniels have to be lauded for simple endurance for performing and attending a show that clocks in at over 2 hours and 45 minutes in the second-story workroom of an ventilationless un-air-conditioned former chocolate factory on a night when the heat and humidity of the New York City summer made sure to suck the humanity out of everyone just as efficiently as the late 19th-century society sucked away the livelihood and independence of the eponymous women of the play.
But all for naught.
As a production company, Flying Fig Theatre describes itself as "dedicated to producing compelling theatrical stories about women's lives," and Daniels' work fits their bill. It is a straight-forward social-issues play about how economic changes and cultural biases about the "lower classes" serve to undermine and domesticate a group of economically independent "gut girls," the ones who dress the carcasses of beef, sheep, and other animals after they have been slaughtered at the slaughter-house. Their work earns them good wages and social choices not available to other women, who must either get married or find some other way to protect themselves from the depredations of a stratified British society.
But director Michaela Goldhaber and her crew of under-trained actors fail to bring this story to life. First of all, production values are anemic. The lighting design tended to throw more light on the audience than the stage because lighting designer Rebekah Bateman failed to use enough instruments to fill the space. The meat carcasses and body parts are clearly rubber, and the hearts and livers and glands often bounced when tossed into their buckets. Even The Gut Girls' knives were wrong; one of them wielded by Maggie (Tiffany Green) was clearly something drawn from the sideboard, not from a butcher's knife rack.
But all such technical lacklusters can be forgiven if the performance rises above and beyond them, and here is where director Goldhaber's lack of finesse and clarity doom the project. The actors gamely tried to work the Deptford accents coached to them by dialect coach Linda Jones, but they could never mouth them capably, with the result that many lines simply got swallowed up. (The harsh acoustics of the space didn't help vocal matters at all.) It probably would have been better to drop the accents and let the actors use their own voices.
But even this unhampering may not have been enough to boost the quality of the actors' work. The performances, without exception, were bland and, at times, embarrassing to watch. As mates, The Gut Girls (Tiffany Green, Twinkle Burke, Beth Wren Elliott, Tracy Pérez, and Janine Kyanko) sometimes achieved the camaraderie that they were supposed to have, but overall the performances never achieved a smoothly integrated ensemble feel.
In part, this was because the play's pacing was erratic. Almost every scene shift required a change in set, and more often than not, a scene simply ended with the lights being bumped off, followed by everyone scurrying around to set up the bar in a saloon or a drawing room or the cutting floor. Because the set changes lacked co-ordination and rhythm, they invariably took the audience (and the actors) completely out of the flow of the play.
And then the play itself -- or at least Goldhaber's conception of it. The audience knows going in pretty much what the outcome of this play is going to be -- in short, it is the theatre-going equivalent of watching an accident happen without being able to do anything to prevent it. In her moralizing script, Daniels builds in no suspense, no mystery, no surprise -- it is all just lessons and warnings and waiting for the inevitable to inevitably happen. This is not to say that what Daniels wants to deplore in this play is not worth deploring because while the story and title focus on the abasement of the girls, all the women in this play suffer from social and economic expectations that keep them rigidly, and sometimes brutally, in their places.
Given the theatrical limitations of this didactic piece, the performance space, and her budget, Goldhaber made an ill-advised choice to follow Daniels' lead without re-imagining anything at all -- not set, not costume, not stage-business, not anything. What the audience gets is presentation, not drama or dramatic narrative, an almost-three-hour amateurish slog through abasement that is meant to teach us something and do us some good but which, in the end, just wears us out and provides no pleasure.
A good theatre-going buddy of mine has a phrase for this: theatre jail. Again, kudos to the actors and crew for their resolute attempt, but the greatest pleasure of The Gut Girls was being released from the airless cell of The Chocolate Factory into the humid night.
The Gut Girls by Sarah Daniels
Produced by Flying Fig Theatre (Heather Ondersma and Michaela Goldhaber)
Directed by Michaela Goldhaber
July 17 - August 7, 2005, at the The Chocolate Factory, 5-49 49th Avenue in Long Island City, New York. Tickets: $15. Reservations: 212-868-4444 or
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