"What does your job entail?" asks do-gooder Lady Helena (Irene McDonnell). "You put your finger right on it," replies "gut girl" Polly (Twinkle Burke). "Entrails." The exchange happens when Lady Helena visits a cattle market to invite the girls employed there to her social club. The moment, highlighting the girls' sauciness, is one of the few times British playwright Sarah Daniels trusts the audience to understand social context without a road map. Daniels' play is a poor man's Caryl Churchill or Pam Gems: clumsy agitprop (though what it's agitating for is unclear) in which all the men are bullies, hypocrites, or rapists; all the "gut girls" -- women who take the nasty but well-paid jobs in the cattle market -- are funny, independent, and forward-thinking; and an upper-class accent signifies narrow-mindedness. It's like the film "Gosford Park," but without the park ("Gosford Pork," perhaps?).
The girls are all types: political agitator Ellen (Beth Wren Elliott); sweet Annie, the "fallen woman" (Janine Kyanko); flexible opportunist Kate (Tracy Pérez); and saucy Maggie (Tiffany Green). Their banter is amusing, and the actors turn in convincing performances, particularly Green and Kyanko. Soraya Broukhim is also effective as unhappy aristocrat Priscilla. But the playwright's top-heavy diatribes drag them down.
The production does not help. Director Michaela Goldhaber's staging is flabby, punching up the politics but not the art. Scenic designer Heather Ondersma creates atmosphere with plastic sides of beef in the entryway, but the white space is pristine. The effect is neither realistic nor stylized. Cotton-mouthed accents and double casting confuse the action.
"The Gut Girls" is two and a half hours long, with 17 roles played by 10 actors. Though it sprawls into such issues as birth control, gender, class, spousal abuse, labor unions, and even neighborhood gentrification, it hits the same note repeatedly.