‘Steel Magnolias’ At Playhouse On Park Comes Off As Series Of One-Liners

I am one of those rare souls who knows “Steel Magnolias” as a stage play better than the 1989 movie version starring Dolly Parton, Shirley MacLaine, Julia Roberts, Daryl Hannah and Olympia Dukakis. The play also inspired a failed TV pilot and 2012 TV-movie remake (with an African-American cast).

For those who are more familiar with the silver-screen “Steel Magnolias,” understand this: Robert Harling’s original play has one set — Truvy’s beauty salon — and a six-person, all-female cast. It is a safe haven, a closed universe. When these women complain about their shiftless, incompetent or criminally inclined spouses, those shiftless louts are nowhere to be seen onstage. These are giddy conversations conducted in confidence, behind sanctuary doors through which men never pass.

That makes for an interesting play, on the beautified face of it. The show’s soap-operatic subplots are lived, or simply gossiped about, by salon owner Truvy; her new employee Annelle; their longterm clients Clairee (the wife of a local politician), M’Lynn Eatenton and her daughter Shelby; and the sharp-tongued, well-off Ouiser. The characters have their joys and anguishes, rallying around each other with words of support that can come off as both sentimental and sassy.

Much of the dialogue consists of one-liners that don’t worry about holding up the narrative:

“Honey, it’s the ’80s. If you can achieve puberty, you can achieve a past.”

“I promise that my personal tragedy will not interfere with my ability to do good hair.”

“There’s no such thing as natural beauty.”

West Hartford’s Playhouse on Park, usually reliable with mainstream melodramas such as this, falters with a production that simply does not create the atmosphere and community spirit essential to this Southern-charmed script. The accents are inconsistent, the characters don’t seem all that close to each other and the beauty shop environs are not convincing.

The acting styles can seem worlds apart. Jill Taylor Anthony underplays as Truvy, while Peggy Cosgrave brings vaudevillian overkill to Ouiser. Somewhere in the middle are the stately Dorothy Stanley (the Broadway veteran who also happens to be a West Hartford native) as Clairee, Liza Couser as a sweetly clumsy Annelle, Susan Slotoroff as the sensitive newlywed Shelby and Jeannie Hines as a M’Lynn reeling with traumatic revelations.

Hines’ big monologue near the end of the play is undeniably powerful, but stylistically it emerges from nowhere. The necessary emotional groundwork has not been built by a production that seems content to glide from one smile-inducing wisecrack to the next.

Friday’s opening night performance felt wildly off balance, sometimes literally so. A salon chair nearly tipped over while M’Lynn was sitting in it. Annelle tripped over an electrical cord. Props were dropped. The performers dropped a lot of lines as well, and these flubs are all the more noticeable in a play that is meant to be so conversational and intimate.

Director Susan Haefner, working a broad stage area, chooses to clump the characters together in huddles so tight that it’s hard to figure out what’s going on in there, then spread them out again so that they’re shouting from across the stage at each other. Hugs happen, but the actors sometimes have to walk a long way to deliver them.

All these heartwarming clinches, and all the aimless chatter, prolong an already lengthy play. “Steel Magnolia” clocks in at nearly two and a half hours — maybe a decent amount of time if you’re getting your hair done, but tough if you’re watching somebody else do theirs.

In all likelihood, as “Steel Magnolias” settles into its run, the cast will cohere and the dramatic moments could begin to hold their own against the one-liners and sight gags. Until then, steel yourself for a hair treatment that’s still setting.

STEEL MAGNOLIAS plays through Jan. 28 at Playhouse on Park, 244 Park Road, West Hartford. Performances are Wednesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m.; Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 2 p.m.; plus an added matinee Tuesday Jan. 23 at 2 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $40, $22.50 for the Jan. 23 matinee. 860-523-5900 and playhouseonpark.org.