Slaughterhouse Five

Full-throttle politics can squeeze the life out of a play. Too much soapboxing is hard to take on a Friday night out. But The Gut Girls, Sarah Daniels’s story about the rise of women’s rights in turn-of-the-century England, pulls a dark and provocative tale out of a painful and deeply political history. Although it takes its sweet time to get to the energetic heart of this angry play, Masquerade Theatre’s production finds, in the end, something powerful to say about the difficulties of being a woman in a man’s world.

Gut girls were women who sliced the entrails, the offal, of slaughtered livestock before they went on to the butcher. Not a pretty job, but one that paid well, giving the women some autonomy in their lives. Unlike those who labored “in service” as maids and cooks in the homes of the gentry, gut girls weren’t beholden to anyone once their work day was over. Of course, they could be considered just one step up from street walkers, but some women valued their independence more than social graces. Besides, they could bring in more wages in a week than they would get in a year in a service job.

Daniels’s script gives a history and focuses on five gut girls struggling with the strictures of class and gender in an earlier England. Maggie (Sarah Ripper) has seen the way marriage can break a woman and wants none of it. Annie (Sarah Hames) comes to the slaughterhouse as a fallen woman; the son of her former employer raped her, impregnated her and abandoned her to the street. Polly (Damie Oliver) is street-smart and happy with her bloody job; she can take care of her mother and has the freedom to do most of what she pleases. Kate (Katherine Wuensche), the youngest, is only 14. All she thinks about is her boyfriend, though she doesn’t want to marry yet. And the oldest gut girl, Ellen (Amy Ross), reads, wants to be educated and wants to believe she can rule her own destiny. She knows workers need unions to survive with dignity.

These “independent” women’s lives are, in the end, at the mercy of the members of the wealthy class, who decide when to close up shop. To make matters worse, the gut girls become the pet project of the women of the mercantile class. This bunch of bored, dilettante do-gooders wants to “fix” the gut girls by making them more refined. Along the way, the audience discovers that these wealthy women, too, are under the thumb of some man.

Lots of man-bashing takes place, but the historical accuracy of these women’s troubles is deeply disturbing and thought-provoking. It is easy to forget how far women have come in this century. It’s easy to forget just how much guts it took to be a girl.

The Gut Girls runs through September 18 at Masquerade Theatre, 1537 North Shepherd, (713) 861-7045. $5-$10.