Steel Magnolias
A Southern Treasure
by Robert Harling
directed by John Feltch
April 10 – May 8, 2011
Have a good hair day.
Many things beside hair get done at Truvy’s hair salon, and that’s why it is the place to go in Chinquapin Parish, Louisiana. Gossip, revelations and witty Southern banter flow like refreshing sweet tea on a hot summer day. The opinionated Truvy and her new assistant, Annelle, play host to unlikely friends Ouiser and Clairee, the respectable and sociable M’Lynn and her beautiful daughter, Shelby. As the women come face to face with difficult times, they are brought together through strength and love.
“Smell that sweet fragrance? It's the intoxicating Steel Magnolias....”
–Lynn Jessup, Classical Voice of North Carolina
Read the full review
Running time: 2 hours and 30 minutes, including one fifteen-minute intermission.
Steel Magnolias on 88.5 WFDD's Triad Arts Up Close
Director John Feltch and actresses Beth Ritson and Catherine Charlesbois talk about the enduring quality of Steel Magnolias. With host David Ford.
Listen to the interview podcast from 88.5 WFDD here.
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Smart… and from the heart. Those are the key ingredients to any massively popular play, and this one hit it out of the park. From its long Broadway run to the beloved film to countless regional productions, Steel Magnolias was an instant classic. It’s safe to say it spawned TV shows (Designing Women for one) and other plays and films too numerous to mention, all based on the seemingly inexhaustible appeal of strong Southern women and their wit, wisdom and, well, love of life.
More than almost any play I can think of, Steel Magnolias is about love. That may seem obvious to those of you who already know the story or it may not: there are no “love scenes” or men around here. Just six distinctly and lovingly rendered women of different experiences and world views who COULD live without one another but don’t want to. Ever. And this love often isn’t easy or nice or even happy-making. It’s a love that “families of the heart” have and as such it mirrors the love of one’s birth family, but adds a remarkable and mysterious element: the way the most unlikely personalities can capture us, reflect and refract what we think of as strength or virtue, can complete us.
We often give short shrift to popular pieces, especially comedies, since the higher goal of theatre artists is usually to provoke thought in some less traveled way, to examine the political and cultural truths we live with, and ask our audience to examine their own truths in a new light. But plays like Steel Magnolias can, if done with fidelity to their setting and their characters, help us to laugh and, yes, cry a bit on the way to a different but no less valid kind of catharsis: a re-examination of what friendship and community mean to us and what sort of legacy we will leave behind us. In a time of economic upheaval and worldwide calamity, a time of increased loneliness and alienation, perhaps a play like this can lead us past nostalgia and toward a new urgency for simple kindness, for reaching out. And if not that, it might just make you laugh for a couple of hours, which ain’t bad either.
I hope you enjoy these six remarkable ladies as much as I have enjoyed watching them be brought to life by six remarkable actresses.
 John Feltch |
