STAGE REVIEW : Lamb’s Theatre Takes Some Steel Out of ‘Magnolias’

“Steel Magnolias” is as much a eulogy as it is a play.

Playwright Robert Harling wrote it for his sister, Susan Harling Robinson, a diabetic who died roughly a year after having had the baby she conceived, apparently in defiance of doctors’ orders. The play is dedicated to her memory and to her son, Robert.

Eulogies are by their nature private things. Harling made his to his sister universal by setting such memories in a small-town Louisiana beauty shop, where six women, including his sister, take their hair down, literally and figuratively.

The down-to-earth setting and his skill at cutting the sweetness with zingy one-liners and quirky Southern character development helped make “Steel Magnolias” an off-Broadway success and later a movie in which seemingly every actress who was hot at the time wanted to star. Shirley MacLaine, Olympia Dukakis, Sally Field, Dolly Parton, Daryl Hannah and Julia Roberts ended up sharing the spotlight.

Lamb’s Players Theatre, which now presents the show through March 28, does a handsome job with the piece. For those who have seen the overblown movie and its regrettable star-turn excesses, this production is better--more intimate and more intense. For those who have read the play or seen it performed on stage before, one character’s second-act development--her becoming a blindly devoted born-again Christian--has been gutted, reducing this sextet to a quintet by default.

But because the good parts are done so well, you have to know the play to appreciate what’s missing.

The play takes place in four distinct scenes over about two years--all in Truvy Jones’ beauty shop. Over time, you meet Truvy, her nervous new assistant, Annelle, three regular patrons and, of course, Shelby--who visits to get dolled up on her wedding day and returns on the eve of other subsequent life-changing events.

Director Deborah Gilmour Smyth has cast the three regular clients of the beauty shop impeccably. And in those parts local actresses Patricia DiMeo as Clairee (wise-cracking widow of the former mayor), Gail West (as Shelby’s repressed and protective mother) and Darlene Trent (as the wealthy curmudgeon Ouiser who has been “in a very bad mood for 40 years”) give what may be their best performances ever. When these three interact, the play soars--magically.

Mhari Frothingham Sandoval brings a fresh and lovely look to Shelby, described in the play notes simply as “the prettiest girl in town.” Her performance, however, could use more depth, especially near the end when we need to see some of the debilitating effects of her condition.

In the one serious piece of miscasting, Veronica Murphy Smith, who plays Truvy, seems desperately out of place--like a Northerner straining to master a down-home Southern delivery.

But it is Cynthia Peters--so good as Annelle in the first act that she nearly steals the show--who ends up sabotaging the play in the second by moving away from her character as written, in a wrong-headed director’s choice.

In the second act, Annelle is supposed to find religion with a fanaticism that makes her withdrawn and inaccessible to the others. Not until tragedy strikes does she begin to reconnect.

But in this production, Annelle’s sudden conversion to fundamentalist religion is a positive, happy thing that makes the worried comments about her needing to “lighten up” seem to be the problem of those uttering them. Perhaps Lamb’s, a company that prides itself on “commonality of Christian faith” (as it says in the program), felt negative attitudes about religion were offensive to them or to their audience.

Still, this is the playwright’s story and should be respected as such. Dramatically, too, this change robs the second act of a significant thread of tension. And in a show as immersed in one woman’s pathos as this one, one cannot afford to sacrifice any of the other story lines that give the work texture.

Overall, Smyth’s direction brings a fresh, natural quality to the women’s banter--in which great personal confessions slip out with the recipes and the quips. But she seems too quick to go for the laughs--and too timid about lingering on the moments of feeling.

The strength of Michael Buckley’s set lies in its natural quality; its weakness is its blandness. Everything works in this well-appointed beauty shop. The only problem is that there are none of the little kitschy touches that show Truvy’s stamp on the place.

Jeanne Reith’s costume designs are colorful and consistently appropriate with the exception of Annelle’s clothes in the second act (a cheerful, low-cut flower print that again seems to fit in with the director’s choice rather than the playwright’s). The lighting by C. Todd Brown and the sound design by David Heath both work fine.

“Steel Magnolias” is the first play of Lamb’s 15th annual season. It’s a production that shows the company at once at its best and worst. The talent, as always, is there. But Lamb’s should either pass on plays it can’t tell in the way they are written or fight the temptation to retell them in a way it finds acceptable. It is always far better to let the playwright tell a story in his own way, with his own feelings--right or wrong--intact.