In my past life as an English teacher, one of my happier chores was teaching Shakespeare, especially watching my students move from apprehension to comprehension. Most students are terrified of the Bard, with his reputation for intricacy and language so dense you need a machete to cut through it. Therefore, the first step in teaching Shakespeare is to de-mythologize him.
Rather than being the ivory-tower intellectual for whom he is often mistaken, Will wrote plays for popular appeal, plays meant to be seen and understood by largely illiterate audiences, many of whom had just lost money betting on bear-baiting. Will was one of the few producers of theater in his day who actually turned a profit doing so, and he did it by being accessible. No matter how convoluted the plot of any of his plays, it can be understood and appreciated in one viewing, if one simply stops trying to analyze it and just lets it all in.
Steel Magnolias is not Shakespeare by any means, but it is a daunting play because there is so much going on in it. Robert Harling’s 1987 play focuses on six women, friends and confidants, who gather in a beauty parlor in small-town Louisiana to share each other’s triumphs and tragedies. As the play takes place over three years, there are a lot of those, and as the six women are the only characters, there’s a lot of telling to be done.
Most people know Steel Magnolias from the 1988 movie with Sally Field, Shirley MacLaine and Julia Roberts, but that is a whole different animal from the play. We never meet the men nor witness the events in these ladies’ lives, and so it takes a seriously talented cast to pull off the incredible amount of exposition, emotional reaction and mercurial dialogue necessary to stage this play, both a drama and a comedy in equal measure. It takes some hardcore plate-spinning, but Circle Ensemble Theatre manages it handily in their new production, now playing at Ashford Manor in Watkinsville.
Truvy (Kathleen Hogan) runs the beauty parlor where the women gather, along with her new hire Annelle (Chelsea Dunham), who goes from wallflower to party girl to born-again Christian over the course of the play. Their regular customers include the patrician Clairee (Lisa Mende) and her perpetual foil, the ever-ill-tempered Ouiser (Stephanie Astalos-Jones), and M’Lynn (Joelle Re’ Arp-Dunham), a model wife and mother of Shelby (Maria Moody).
Personally, I have never been able to get past my annoyance with Harling for the names he’s given his characters—it always smacked of a contrived attempt to inject maximum “Southernness†into the play—but that’s neither here nor there. Harling reportedly wrote this play as catharsis after the death of his younger sister from diabetic complications, and the play’s central plot deals with the onset of Shelby’s Type 1 diabetes, her wedding and her portentous decision to have a child despite the risks to her health. Meanwhile, Truvy and Annelle, Clairee and Ouiser, have three years’ worth of side-story that weaves in and out of the ups and downs of Shelby and M’Lynn.
Mende and Astalos-Jones have the most fun in this production, trading barbs with dead-on timing as their unlikely relationship evolves. Hogan is appropriately sassy, and Dunham strikes a fine balance between Annelle the hapless newcomer and Annelle the stand-in entrance character for the audience.
Arp-Dunham and Moody have it the hardest. It seems cruel to criticize a character written specifically to represent a real person who died tragically, but Shelby is a maudlin character—too good, too sweet, too brave in the face of her own fate—and M’Lynn, as Shelby’s rock, is written as shallowly. It’s to the actresses’ credit, therefore, that they are able to reach into the corners and find the nuances that breathe some life and dimension into their characters.
Guest director Rick Andosca has done a good job of facilitating fine work from his cast, and the play is well worth checking out. Circle Ensemble, the newest theater company in town with a reputation for edgy fare, has put together a Steel Magnolias of which it can be proud. They keep the plates spinning with style.
[Steel Magnolias continues Thursday–Saturday, July 12–14, at Ashford Manor, Watkinsville. All showtimes are 8 p.m. Tickets are $15, $10 for students and may be purchased online at www.circleensembletheatre.com or by calling 706-362-2175.]
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