Steel Magnolias in Lindsay

Steel Magnolias opens on April 4 at 7:30 at the Lindsay Community Theater. Other performances are April 5, 6, 11, 12, and 13 at 7:30 and April 7 and 14 at 2:00 PM. Tickets are $10 for adults and $5 for students. Seating is limited to 60 seats on the stage for each performance, so get your tickets early at lindsaycommunitytheater.com. Snacks, sodas, beer, and wine are available to enjoy during the performance. The play (directed by Alyson Cook) opens with discussion of Shelby's wedding day to her fiancé, Jackson, in the fictional northwestern Louisiana parish of Chinquapin at Truvy's (Sonia Gutierrez-Mendoza ) in-home beauty parlour where the women regularly gather. It covers events over the next three years with Shelby's (Kacie Bellisch ) Type 1 diabetes and how the women interact at times with conflict but in the end resolved friends: Shelby's decision to have a child despite the complication that could result from her condition, Clairee's (Velva Lynn Hampson) friendship with the curmudgeon Ouiser (Andrea Brown Conner); Annelle's (Anna Moore ) transformation from a shy, anxious newcomer in town to a good-time girl then repentant revival-tent Christian; and Truvy's relationships with the men in her family. Although the main storyline involves Shelby, her mother M'Lynn (Joanne Cook), and Shelby's medical battles, the underlying group-friendship among all six women is prominent throughout the drama. The play is based on the family experience of the play's author Robert Harling following the death in 1985 from diabetic complications of his sister Susan Harling-Robinson after the birth of his namesake nephew and failure of a family member donated kidney. A writer friend following the death advised him to write it down to come to terms with the experience. He did but originally as a short story to give his nephew an understanding of the child's deceased mother. It eventually evolved in ten days to a play performed Off-Broadway before being adapted for the Steel Magnolias movie (1989). Harling, maybe based on his short, dry experience in the field of law ("not many laughs in Brown v. Board of Education"), felt it important to include the way the characters used humor and lighthearted conversations to cope with the seriousness of the underlying situations. Harling wanted the audience to have a true representation of what his family endured during his sister's experience.