Hard-Working Cast Never Bonds

What once seemed touching and real on stage can, years later, feel creaky, especially when the film version was an iconic, if overwrought, paean to female bonding. So it is with “Steel Magnolias,” Robert Harling’s 1987 play based on his family’s real-life experience with tragedy and loss, playing in Rhinebeck.

If you have seen the movie you know the story: A group of women in a bucolic Louisiana town, where houses are large, lawns are verdant and magnolia blossoms are everywhere, gather regularly in a beauty parlor to swap recipes, have their hair done and share their lives. The play opens on Shelby’s (Alina Gonzalez) wedding day, when salon owner Truvy (Mia Lynn Shelton) is preparing Shelby’s mother, M’Lynn Eatenton (Lisa Lynds), and the other women for the wedding.

In two acts, each with two scenes, Shelby, a diabetic who has been advised not to bear children, becomes pregnant, bears a son, receives a transplanted kidney donated by her mother, goes into coma when the kidney fails and dies. Whew!

This kind of melodrama, lightened by one-line zingers and aphorisms such as “an ounce of pretentious is worth a pound of manure,” requires a cast with impeccable timing, believable Louisiana accents and a melding of styles. It also needs a production that is swift and agile or the play can seem much longer than its two-and-a-half hours. Much longer.

The cast in Rhinebeck works hard but never seems close-knit; each member is in her own zone. As Truvy, Shelton tries but is hampered by odd costumes. In the first scene, her zaftig figure is clothed in a flowered, silky dress that is so tight Shelton is constantly pulling at it. Her Louisiana accent comes and, mostly, goes. But no one in the cast sounds believably Louisianian.

The best performance comes from Gonzalez. Her Shelby is reed-thin, fragile yet determined. When she and her new husband are denied by adoption agencies and she decides to become pregnant, you feel her need to be a mother and her need for her own mother’s approval. Lynds, afflicted with a terrible wig with bangs — think Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra, but blonde — gives a Bette Davis performance that is more angry than maternal. 

Susan Lombard is too young for Clairee, the football-obsessed rich widow, while Marlene Golia is more caricature  than character as Ousier, Clairee’s even richer best friend. Jessie Truin does a fine turn as Annelle, the mysterious young woman just hired by Truvy as an assistant.

The best aspect of the show is Bill Ross’s set. Open to the audience with no curtain, Ross gives us a realistic salon full of Truvy’s tchotchkes and mementos. Since every scene takes place in a different time and season, a hard-working stage crew redresses the set before our eyes, slowing the production’s flow. Tracy Carney’s direction is often successful, particularly in the realistic hairstyling sequences, but she never makes the cast bond.

“Steel Magnolias” runs at The Center for Performing Arts at Rhinebeck, NY, through June 19. For tickets and directions, go to www.centerforperformingarts.org or call 845-876-3080.