In a word, “Epic.”

That’s how I would describe Sharon King-Campbell’s Factory Girls, presented as a dramatic reading on Night Seven of the Year of the Arts Women’s Play Festival.

Ten actors took to the stage to play a score of characters, but primarily ten women who went to work in a munitions factory in Toronto during World War I. The characters range in age from a 71-year-old mother to a 16-year-old farm girl; leisure to working class.

Reading director Jeannette Lambermont-Morey did a fine job of giving a glimpse into what a full staging of this play might include, from the sounds of the factory floor cleverly created using simple props to minimal but dramatic movement. I thought the clicking of knitting needles at all the meetings, done using a mouth effect, was clever.

This play would be a large one to produce, with a sizable cast, large set, period costumes and special effects (such as shredded paper “falling from the sky and being cleared like piles of snow.”

Sharon originally wrote Factory Girls as her MA thesis, which she admits she wrote with ten actors “because I didn't have to have a plan to produce it myself.” Funny what dreaming big can accomplish. This is a well conceived historical drama that any actress would kill to be part of. It was very entertaining and, if staged, would be an enjoyable night at the theatre. I liked that this show drives home a lot of important information about women’s lives and women’s conditions in the early 1900s without hammering you over the head with it.

There were a lot of familiar and some new faces on the stage, and strong performances from all. I especially enjoyed Alexis Koetting’s Beulah Johnston; the relationship between Edie St-Croix (Melissa Williams) and Jane Baker (Alison Clarke); and the mother-daughter banter between Beatrice Maloney (Jillian Rees-Brown) and Ellen Maloney (Bridget Wareham). Willow Kean played Mary; Willa Small played Abigail Garner; Robyn Vivian was Ann Jones; and Kiersten Noel played Laura McAlister. Alison Woolridge did a stellar job embodying two diverse characters – the mousey Sophia, an Austrian immigrant; and the bombastic and repugnant Davis, the play’s only male character.

Night Eight includes With Apologies to Nancy Benoit, a play written and performed by Venus Argento Barrington, and Goldstar Girlfriend, written and performed by Susan Kelsey.

See you at 7 p.m.!