A Lack of Subtlety

At the climax of Frances Mizrahi’s Depression-era drama “Women of Worth,” her heroines face off against bulldozers about to raze their “Hooverville” shanty town. With their husbands on strike against the farm owners, the wives raise signs, including one that reads: “We Stand Behind Our Men.”

The sentiment is clear, yet nothing could be more misleading about “Women of Worth.” Mizrahi places her men far behind her women. The play is a deliberate gender reversal of “Grapes of Wrath,” also about folks running out of hopes in 1930s California.

At its best, this ensemble saga at Group Repertory Theatre explores the varied permutations of what it was to be a woman in such desperate times. It often seems that Mizrahi hasn’t missed a single social type among her female principles, each distinctly etched.

At its weakest, however, the play devolves into bathos, tilting this way for Steinbeck melodrama and that way for an old lefty sentiment straight out of “The Good Earth.”

Mizrahi, adapting her play from Jeane Westin’s book of oral histories, “Making Do,” is pedantic in the way she dramatizes ideas, delivering her points with all of the broad-stroke bluntness of one of the women’s picket signs.

The story begins more subtly, and this community of woman is gradually presented under Lori Street-Tubert’s careful direction. Christ-loving Kate (Diane Frank) is raising two strong-willed girls, Betty Jo (Amelia Norfleet) and Mary Belle (Zoe Buck). Emily (Anecia Ross) is barely able to care for her baby while her husband is up north looking for work.

Lupe (Laura P. Vega) is stronger and willing to buck the farm growers. Crusty old Clara (Bonnie Snyder) has all her hopes contained in a jar of sugar--which she can use when she finally gets a real house with a stove.

Predictably, when feisty Helen (Rachelle Carmony) arrives and tries to organize the women as a farm-labor force, problems arise. The local sheriff (a dreadfully unintimidating Philip McKeown) is a stereotyped bad guy who just wants the shantytown torn down and Helen out. The preacher (Hale Porter) rails against Helen’s communism and suggests that the poor are partly to blame for their misery.

Meanwhile, Helen’s own struggles include fights with her unfeeling father (Shelly Kurtz) and her husband, Leon (Vince Cefalu), who’s leaving the Communists and wants Helen to leave with him.

The involved political plot of “Women of Worth” only grows creakier and less interesting when it should intensify. It’s done in by overly obvious dialogue and Helen’s speeches, which Carmony does with loud, Joan of Arc-like certitude.

The subplot of Betty Jo’s running away and riding the rails is infinitely more compelling. Norfleet delivers a powerful performance of a changing young woman, and her scene with a female hobo played by the chameleonic Sally Richter holds a dramatic charge missing from the rest of the play.

Everyone looks a bit too well-scrubbed, and there’s rarely the sense of tragic extremes that courses through “Grapes of Wrath.”

But Frank, Snyder, Vega, Ross and the charming Buck individualize these women by internalizing their characters’ broken or budding dreams. They’re accompanied by Mignon Goetze as a singing drunk, better at singing than being drunk.

No one may look like she needs a bath, but the Hooverville set by Desma Murphy looks thoroughly lived-in, an almost overwhelming representation of poverty.

BE THERE

“Women of Worth,” Group Repertory Theatre, 10900 Burbank Blvd., North Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends March 28. (818) 769-7529. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.