Steel Magnolias by ROBERT HARLING Directed by LISA ROTHE
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McGuire Proscenium Stage / Oct 26 – Dec 15, 2019 Steel Magnolias by ROBERT HARLING directed by LISA ROTHE PLAY GUIDE Inside THE PLAY Synopsis, Setting and Characters • 4 Responses to Steel Magnolias • 5 THE PLAYWRIGHT About Robert Harling • 7 On Writing Steel Magnolias and Its Legacy • 8 CULTURAL CONTEXT Southern Writers • 10 Type 1 Diabetes • 12 In the Community • 13 People, Places and Things in the Play • 15 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION For Further Reading and Understanding • 18 Guthrie Theater Play Guide Copyright 2019 DRAMATURG Carla Steen GRAPHIC DESIGNER Akemi Graves CONTRIBUTORS Rosie Jablonsky, Morgan Holmes, Carla Steen Guthrie Theater, 818 South 2nd Street, Minneapolis, MN 55415 EDITOR Johanna Buch ADMINISTRATION 612.225.6000 All rights reserved. With the exception of classroom use by BOX OFFICE 612.377.2224 or 1.877.44.STAGE (toll-free) teachers and individual personal use, no part of this Play Guide may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic guthrietheater.org • Joseph Haj, artistic director or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Some materials published herein are written especially for our Guide. Others are reprinted by permission of their publishers. The Guthrie creates transformative theater experiences that ignite the imagination, The Guthrie Theater receives support from the National stir the heart, open the mind and build community through the illumination of our Endowment for the Arts. This activity is made possible in part by the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation common humanity. by the Minnesota State Legislature. The Minnesota State Arts Board received additional funds to support this activity from the National Endowment for the Arts. 2 \ GUTHRIE THEATER PHOTO: THE CAST OF STEEL MAGNOLIAS (DAN NORMAN) “I would rather have 30 minutes of wonderful than a lifetime of nothing special.” – Shelby to M’Lynn in Steel Magnolias About This Guide This play guide is designed to fuel up on a play before you see it DIG DEEPER your curiosity and deepen your onstage. Or perhaps you’re a fellow If you are a theater company understanding of a show’s history, theater company doing research and would like more meaning and cultural relevance for an upcoming production. information about this so you can make the most of your We’re glad you found your way production, contact Resident theatergoing experience. You might here, and we encourage you to Dramaturg Carla Steen at be reading this because you fell in dig in and mine the depths of this [email protected]. love with a show you saw at the extraordinary story. Guthrie. Maybe you want to read GUTHRIE THEATER \ 3 THE PLAY SETTING A beauty salon in Chinquapin, Louisiana, in the 1980s. CHARACTERS Truvy, the owner of a beauty salon Annelle, Truvy’s assistant in the salon Clairee, the grande dame widow of the former mayor M’Lynn, a socially prominent career woman Shelby, M’Lynn’s daughter and bride-to-be Ouiser, a wealthy curmudgeon PHOTO: NICOLE KING AND AUSTENE VAN IN STEEL MAGNOLIAS (DAN NORMAN) Synopsis Truvy’s salon in Chinquapin, she’s recovered. Shelby’s health “When I was a kid, the Louisiana, is a gathering place is fragile because she’s diabetic, mystique of the beauty and sanctuary for a close- which makes M’Lynn worry about parlor was that guys knit group of women from the her daughter’s choices and the neighborhood. Recently widowed physical toll Shelby’s body may were never allowed. Clairee is adjusting to life without not be able to bear. You didn’t know what her husband, who was the town’s went on in there, and former mayor. Ouiser, a wealthy Over the next few years, as Clairee curmudgeon, finds any excuse fills the void left by her husband’s they all came back to bicker and complain. Truvy death, Annelle embraces life in different somehow. has hired young Annelle just Chinquapin and Ouiser strikes up in time to get Shelby and her a new friendship, Truvy’s salon I realized this mother, M’Lynn, ready for Shelby’s remains at the center of their hermetically sealed wedding later that day, and the lives and becomes an oasis when environment would be women’s excitement fills the tragedy strikes. beauty shop with gossip, warmth the best place to have and familiarity. these women express When the normally friendly their true feelings.” Shelby suddenly becomes cranky, everyone realizes her blood sugar – Robert Harling, quoted in has dropped, and the women fuss Garden & Gun, April/May 2017 over her and give her juice until 4 \ GUTHRIE THEATER THE PLAY critiques. And we don’t lose sight of the real focus of the play, which is how these women relate to each other. Ted Shaw, “Play transports you to Louisiana salon,” The Windsor (Ont.) Star, November 29, 1996 Like a hummingbird flitting among the bougainvillea, the two-hanky warhorse Steel Magnolias just shouldn’t fly. It’s talky, contrived and manipulative. But it works. … The play traces preparations for the wedding of the youngest customer, the birth of her first child and some life-threatening illnesses, all lubricated with shrieks of laughter PHOTO: NICOLE KING, MELISSA MAXWELL AND ADELIN PHELPS IN STEEL MAGNOLIAS (DAN NORMAN) and a plethora of hugs — sort of a Eudora Welty take on Our Town. Inexplicably, this collection of Responses to archetypes sidesteps stereotyping, even if they are cut out of a Steel Magnolias Montgomery Ward’s catalog. All seem realistic if eccentric individuals, like the crusty biddy Mr. Harling has a grasp of local Alternating between humor and who says “I’m not crazy. I’ve just language, as in [Truvy’s] remarks, pathos, Steel Magnolias is a marvel been in a very bad mood for 40 many of which seem filtered of controlled energy and verbal years.” Playwright Robert Harling through the imagery of her interplay. Truvy’s Beauty Shop is excels at witty pronouncements profession. “I always wanted to go where old friends and relatives tossed off effortlessly by this sextet to Baltimore,” she says, “because I meet to gossip, commiserate, as if they were the Deep South heard it’s the hairdo capital of cajole, and enjoy each other’s chapter of the Algonquin the world.” … company. They can literally let their Round Table. hair down at Truvy’s. … “Steel Magnolias” is at its most Bill Hirschman, “These Magnolias Still perceptive in offhand moments, Anyone who has seen the movie … Steely,” South Florida Sun Sentinel, May 15, as when one woman, caught up but isn’t familiar with the original 2003 in her own problems, says, “I just play will be surprised at the lack of can’t talk about it,” and the others men. Harling had to open up the reflexively respond in unison: “Of script for the screen and include course you can.” “Steel Magnolias” the husbands, boyfriends, and ex- is an amiable evening of sweet lovers who figure in the women’s sympathies and smalltown chatter. beauty shop discussions. Mel Gussow, “Stage: ‘Steel Magnolias,’ A But the play is more effective Louisiana Story,” The New York Times, March because of the absence of men. It’s 27, 1987 more fun imagining them from the women’s colorful descriptions and GUTHRIE THEATER \ 5 THE PLAY Shampoo. Set. And cry. rich, she admits. “That’s why I serve it over ice cream to cut This isn’t the age-old lingo of the sweetness.” cosmetology (unless you are talking about a really bad hair day) Like a lot of Southern cooking, this but the essential formula of Robert play … doesn’t stint on the sugar. Harling’s weepy broad comedy But of course, as experienced Steel Magnolias. … bakers know, without a pinch of salt, sugar can be just plain cloying. But as the new True Colors Theatre The batter for Steel Magnolias … staging suggests, Steel Magnolias may not cook up into haute cuisine, is more than just a caricature-ish but it has just enough salty, sour, “Perms of Endearment” about bitter and umami, along with the a particular type of breathless sweet, to engage the entire palate. I Southern belle who sits by the challenge the most sophisticated of country-club pool in the mornings you not to cry at the end. and swaps recipes for cheese straws and chicken salad in Margaret Gray, “Fine Southern charm,” the afternoons. … Los Angeles Times, April 26, 2019 For True Colors, director Kent PHOTO: SALLY WINGERT AND MELISSA MAXWELL IN STEEL MAGNOLIAS (DAN NORMAN) Gash has placed African American women in the pivotal roles of Truvy and her assistant Annelle — and the good news is that it’s not this big PC thing (like, say, putting the first black Martha in Virginia Woolf or doing an African American Glass Menagerie). Such smart casting may be a psychological breakthrough for Atlanta. To be sure, it’s the kind of ahead-of-the- curve thinking that makes Kenny Leon’s True Colors a strong local asset and a national player. Wendell Brock, “Salon humor ‘Steel’ sharp,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 24, 2004 In the first scene of the play Steel Magnolias, Robert Harling’s 1987 love letter to small-town Southern women, two Louisiana friends share favorites from their recipe boxes. Cuppa Cake is so straightforward, it doesn’t even require an index card: “It’s a cuppa flour, a cuppa sugar, a cuppa fruit cocktail with juice, and you mix and bake at 350 till gold and bubbly,” [Clairee] says. Yes, it’s 6 \ GUTHRIE THEATER THE PLAYWRIGHT About Robert Harling Before launching a successful stage Immediately bridging a career from Harling made his directorial debut and screenwriting career, Robert stage to screen, Harling adapted with The Evening Star, which he Harling graduated from Tulane his original play into the popular also wrote for the screen based on University School of Law, but film of the same name, starring Larry McMurty’s novel.