Girls Gone Worldly When the act of imagining a choice is a radical act, what choices will young women make?
By Celise Kalke
In Janece Shaffer’s The Geller Girls, the playwright invites us to look backward to 1895. When Atlanta was a much smaller city, everyone within a social class knew each other, and the cultural life of Georgia still resided along the coast, in Savannah. Atlanta had risen from the ashes of the Civil War still a railroad hub and commercial leader but not yet an international city. Then, almost 100 years before the Atlanta Olympics of
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1996, a city of some 80,000 people invited 800,000 visitors to the Cotton States Exhibition. Atlanta was on the map and getting ready to start chasing its present-day significance. Shaffer has chosen two young women also poised on the brink of change to portray this exciting time in Atlanta’s history: Louisa, everything a young Southern lady of the time should be, and Rosalee, who is straining at the bit