Theater Review: Steel Magnolias at Trinity Rep

Friday, April 22, 2011

Tracey Minkin, Features Editor

There is an inherent danger in picking a hair style out of a magazine, and having it applied in the beauty parlor.

Such is the misguidedness of Trinity Rep's Steel Magnolias, which has taken a 1980's provincial comedic drama (lots of laughs, but someone dies) set in a small-town Lousiana beauty parlor, and teased it up to suit a 2011 Northeastern contemporary theater.

The play, the film, the stereotypes

If you slept through the late 1980's or were not born yet, then you missed Robert Harling's play made famous by the film of the same name. It showcased the talented Olympia Dukakis and propelled the less-talented Julia Roberts. It was (and is) a genre piece: six women sharing the passing successes, dramas, and tragedies of their small-town lives among the blow-driers and wash-out sinks.

What Steel Magnolias does not do is illuminate the lives of real Southern women; instead it leans hard on regional stereotypes found also (and perhaps to better effect) in Designing Women and Fried Green Tomatoes. Southern white women: They're either tacky and wisecracking or fading and gracious. Magnolias, heavy and redolent, but made of steel. And always, just like their original archetype, Scarlett O'Hara, standing tall against whatever's burning down around them.

Sets and sensibilites

Today, this rings false and simplistic, and Trinity's best efforts to make the play feel somehow modern only highlight the conventionality of the work. Director Brian Mertes and set designer Michael

McGarty have built a set that rotates on a circular base like a wind-up snowglobe and furnished it with decor that verges on patronizing. Oddly, first entrances by each character are accompanied by a kind of choreographed flourish, including the spotlighting of their names on a brick wall, in Batman-spotlight fashion. (In Trinity's Crucible earlier this season, each character stepped forward to announce his or her character's name... does Trinity worry that none of us reads a program any more?)

There are more contrivances. Alternative music more suited to 2011 Brooklyn than 1980s Baton Rouge underscores set changes, and at the conclusion of Act I, the characters mimic a baton routine performed by one of the characters in a beauty pageant. It's not a bad bit, her gestures a cross between kumbaya and Napoleon Dynamite, but it's too ironic to set right with the earnest, parochial storytelling.

Trinity's veteran women

The casting puts all of Trinity's women of standing up against these roles, and like bridesmaids who chafe under their oversprayed up-dos, the talented vets look trapped not only by their one-liners but by their accents, which range from Hope, Arkansas to the campus green at the University of Virginia. Nothing sounds close to that rich and pungent Lousiana drawl.

(Which raises the question: why do theater companies attempt regional accents if they are not prepared to master them?)

What's here, then, to admire? The commitment of Trinity's women to making the best of what they've got, which perhaps, is an unintentional echo of the play's simplistic themes. Rachael Warren not only bounds around like a permed-up greyhound on improbably high heels, but she also executes a respectable up-do on Madeleine Lambert's bride-to-be in Act I. Barbara Meek transcends accent lapses, predictable writing, and even a puffy baseball cap, with an ethereal humor that becomes more defined every year she works at Trinity. Janice Duclos has some lovely maternal moments when she takes control of her diabetically lapsing child who has been sassing and bossing her until her blood sugar plummets.

But ultimately, this is a hairdo that never should have been attempted. The lady in the beauty salon steps in the bright daylight outside the parlor, and as she passes us by we wonder: What in the world was she thinking?

Steel Magnolias at Trinity Repertory Theatre, through May 15. 201 Washington St, Providence, 351-4242.

Rachael Warren (Truvy) and Barbara Meek (Clairee); Rachael Warren (Truvy), Anne Scurria (Ouiser), Madeleine Lambert (Shelby) and Janice Duclos (M'Lynn) in Robert Harling's Steel Magnolias. Photos Mark Turek.

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