Early Girl

Early Girl

Salvage Vanguard Theater, 2803 Manor Rd., 474-8497, www.paladintheatrecompany.com

Through Aug. 22, running time: 2 hr., 10 min.

Who is the early girl? While the rest of the girls sleep off a night of work, the early girl receives any johns that might request service at the brothel during the day. By themselves,sleep-deprived and bored, the stark reality of their situation hits some of the girls particularly hard: How do you know when you've hit rock bottom, and what are you going to do once you get there?

Those are the questions hanging over the working girls in Lana's brothel in Caroline Kava's Early Girl, presented by Paladin Theatre Company. It's certainly not any girl's expectation of making it: lounging about in a living room as pedestrian as an American housewife could make it, wearing either a swimsuit or formal dress, reading issues of Seventeen while waiting for the next john to show. Jean sees the place as hitting rock bottom, no question. Pat sees it as a great way to buy new tape decks, juicers, and other unnecessary accoutrements. Laurel sends the money back to her kid in Spokane. George hopes her regular Eric will marry her – every girl has her reason for being there.

And it's into this stable of hookers with hearts of gold that Lana, the matron, brings a new girl, Lily. Played by Keylee Paige Koop, whose very essence is that of the girl next door, Lily may or may not be of legal age for this illegal profession. Lana presides over the brothel like a fairy godmother spiked with a wicked stepmother. The brothel runs on a few cardinal rules – no using the phone, only leaving the house on one's "doctor day," no violence – the breaking of which merits expulsion.

Early Girl focuses its story on Lily, who plans to work at the brothel just a month in order to secure a solid financial foundation for her daughter, Dolly. For all the seediness that might surround a brothel set in the West, the play is surprisingly domestic. Every scene is set in that selfsame living room. And for a play about prostitution, there is a distinct lack of sex. The closest we come to a visualization of what they do is one girl absentmindedly running a dildo through her hair while looking at old photos. Sure, there's a moment of bare breasts hidden behind arms, but that's due to a catfight between two of the girls.

No, the girls' struggles at the brothel do not surround the sacrifice of their bodies, the threat of diseases, or the things that they're subjected to on a day-to-day basis but are rather philosophical and human in nature. I don't claim to have any basis on which to judge what it's like to prostitute oneself out to countless men in an evening, but the young women in Early Girl are surprisingly workmanlike about it.

Early Girl doesn't aim for grit and suffering but for the hearts of these lost girls. It can be heartbreaking how earnest yet misguided these women can be. Finding their way out of the brothel is finding a way out of their own blocked hearts, something that is endemic to all our lives at some point. What Early Girl ultimately shows us is the connection between people – not some carnal transaction but change, love, loss, and hope.