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by Robert Harling, directed by Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster

Capitol Arts Centre, Capitol Theatre, Port Hope

July 19-August 3, 2025

Shelby: “I would rather have thirty minutes of wonderful than a lifetime of nothing special”

American playwright Robert Harling’s Steel Magnolias has been a feature of summer theatre in Ontario more than three decades. What makes the current production at the Capitol Theatre in Port Hope so special is its all-female creative team and its starry cast. The combination of the two makes this one of the best productions of this much loved 1987 play you are likely to see.

The action is set in Truvy’s beauty salon in the fictional parish of Chinquapin, Louisiana. It is Truvy’s mix of fine hairstyling and love of gossip has made her salon the place where everyone who is someone in the tiny town goes to get her hair done. The action covers a period of 30 months in the 1980s with 18 months passing between Act 1 and Act 2.

The play begins with Truvy trying out a new girl, Annelle, as an assistant. Annelle is eager but anxious and strangely doesn’t know whether she is married or not. Truvy takes into consideration both Annelle’s fervent wish to do well and her desperate need for money when she decides to hire Annelle.

The play follows the changes in Annelle’s life, but as we soon discover they are not the main focus of the plot. The centre of the play is the relationship between a 25-year-old nurse Shelby, who is getting married the very day we meet her, and Shelby’s mother M’Lynn, who is a mental health counsellor. While Shelby is glowing as she looks forward to the event, M’Lynn is full of anxiety. M’Lynn is concerned that Shelby doesn’t have anything very positive to say about her fiancé Jackson, who comes from a family that just likes to kill things. As M’Lynn says, “Jackson is from a good old Southern family with good old Southern values. You either shoot it, stuff it, or marry it”.

Throughout the first scene of Act 1 we hear gunshots fired by M’Lynn’s husband Drum to scare birds off his property where the wedding will take place, shots that keep everybody on edge. Soon we meet two of Truvy’s regulars. One is Clairee, the grande dame of the town and wife of the former mayor. The other is Ouiser (pronounced “Weezer”), a cynical woman with a sharp tongue.

While Shelby’s life and its effect on M’Lynn forms the core of the plot, Annelle’s transformation from outsider to one of the gang is the main parallel plot, with changes in the lives of Ouiser, Clairee and Truvy functioning almost as decoration. The play is really not about action but about the comically varied commentary the six women make about each other’s lives.

Though Harlings’s play premiered Off-Broadway, it transferred to Broadway less than three months later. The original production ran on Broadway for three years and has all the hallmarks of a Broadway play. One is that when the subject matter threatens to become too serious, Harling rather too rapidly switches the tone to comedy. Another hallmark is that the dialogue, though very funny, is constructed of one-liners and characters snappily mocking each other’s remarks in a manner familiar from sitcoms of the period. What gives the play its depth is the central conflict between M’Lynn and Shelby. Shelby has type 1 diabetes and has been unwell since childhood. In Scene 1, her glucose levels suddenly fall and she almost loses consciousness. Shelby’s doctor has told her that she should not have children. Jackson and she have discussed adoption, but Shelby knows that Jackson would really like to have a son of his own.

When Shelby announces in Act 1, Scene 2, that she is pregnant, her comic situation of being married to a Southern “good ole boy” fades into the background and the question of her health comes to the fore. The women still joke with each other about their own matters, but their humour now takes on the guise of preserving a sense of normality in face of an event with potentially tragic consequences. That’s why the women are like “steel magnolias” – seemingly fragile Southern women on the outside, but in reality stronger and more resilient than Southern men.

For the Port Hope production, director Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster has chosen an unbeatable cast, four of the actors making their Port Hope debuts and all most associated with theatre in Toronto. The advantage of having experienced actors playing roles in a play like this is that they are able to make the characters appear more rounded than Harling has written them. Harling allows all the women to hold contradictory views. What Lancaster encourages her cast to do is to show that the women are aware of these contradictions in themselves rather than moving unreflectively from statement to statement.

From a technical point of view, Lancaster enhances the show’s verisimilitude by portraying the method people use when in the salon chair and talking to their hairdresser. The two speak looking at each other’s reflections in the mirror. Lancaster thus imagines a series of large mirrors hung along the invisible fourth wall and frequently shows characters noticing themselves in the mirrors or engaged in this kind of mirror conversation so common in hair salons.

As Truvy, Raquel Duffy provides a prime example of fine acting. Duffy plays the congenial host that Harling has written perfectly. Truvy’s function in the play is primarily to set up the conversations that bind the women together. Yet, Duffy especially highlights aspects of Truvy’s own life. Truvy is always anxious to hear gossip about romantic love, likely because her own life is so devoid of it. Her husband is a couch potato and her two sons are delinquents. By emphasized Truvy’s unhappy background, Duffy makes its clearer why running a salon is so important for Truvy. The salon is a world where she is in charge and where women are free to speak their minds.

Belinda Corpuz makes the character Annelle appear as a comic parallel to the Shelby-M’Lynn storyline. Corpuz may try a bit too hard to make Annelle seem hopelessly self-conscious in the first scene, but she does succeed in making Annelle’s change to become a born-again Christian believable, especially for someone who was so lost and lonely as Annelle has been. Corpuz well depicts how Annelle progresses from being too shy to voice her own opinions to being rather too eager to convert others to her beliefs.

The central pair of the play are M’Lynn and her daughter Shelby happen to be played by real-life mother and daughter Deborah Drakeford and Charlotte Dennis. While authentic casting of these roles is hardly a necessity, there is no doubt that Drakeford and Dennis make the pair’s relationship to each other feel deeply lived-in which suggests that all their arguments have a long history.

Dennis plays Shelby as unsinkably buoyant and optimistic, even though there are facts about her own background and those of her fiancé and future in-laws that are far from rosy. Dennis succeeds in making Shelby’s glossing over these negative facts appear like a willful denial of reality as if she is determined to be happy at all costs. The main flaw in the production is that, except for her fainting bout in Scene 1, neither Dennis nor Lancaster do anything to convey to us how unwell Shelby is. This is primarily a case of makeup rather than performance, but Shelby’s glow of good heath, despite her diabetes, actually increases as the action moves forward rather than decrease as one would expect from Shelby’s medical condition.

Deborah Drakeford gives a powerful performance as M’Lynn. Drakeford imbues M’Lynn from the beginning with tension and anxiety which only worsen throughout the play. Initially, we think that that M’Lynn is merely upset that Shelby disregards all her advice about the wedding. Soon enough Drakeford makes us see that M’Lynn’s worries are far greater. Several moments arise when the other women cheer on Shelby while Drakeford has M’Lynn cringe since the others do not know the reality of the situation. Drakeford has depicted M’Lynn as a woman who bottles up her emotions, but when she finally lets them out in Act 2, the effect is truly disturbing. Harling does not allow M’Lynn’s outburst to take its full course, but Drakeford shows M’Lynn as still shaken by her outburst long after the others have moved on to a cheerier mood.

The two eccentrics of the play are Clairee and Ouiser. Carolyn Fe plays Clairee with grace and dignity. Fe does not have Clairee put on airs as Harling has likely imagined, but not doing so makes the character more grounded and more at one with the other women. Brenda Robins is very funny as Ouiser. When Ouiser says she has been in a bad mood for 40 years, Robins makes it not seem a joke but a statement of fact. Robins’s Ouiser contradicts people’s expectations almost by habit and uses her extremely dry humour to undercut any flights of fancy that the other women express. Ouiser’s own plotline follows a course we couldn’t have foreseen except that it fits in with Ouiser’s contrarian nature.

The production is filled with accurate period detail in Jackie Chau’s set and Laura Gardner’s costumes. Hair and wig consultant Haley Sawyer’s work is vital in lending the show its authenticity. I have never seen the popular 1989 movie based on the play. Now, after seeing the current Port Hope production under Lancaster’s sensitive direction and featuring the ensemble’s stellar work, I don’t feel I have to. Those who live in Port Hope are lucky to have such a high-calibre show in town since this is definitely a show worth travelling to see.

Christopher Hoile

Photo: Raquel Duffy as Truvy, Charlotte Dennis as Shelby, Belinda Corpuz as Annelle and Carolyn Fe as Claire; Raquel Duffy as Truvy and Belinda Corpuz as Annelle; Charlotte Dennis as Shelby and Deborah Drakeford as M’Lynn; Raquel Duffy as Truvy and Brenda Robins as Ouiser. © 2025 Sam Moffatt.

For tickets visit: capitoltheatre.com.