The cast of Steel Magnolias and I gather in the lobby of South Hall of La Sierra University to decide where we’re going for lunch. As consensus seems to be lacking, director Jennifer makes a directorial decision: Norm’s, a Dennysesque eatery near the mall.
We divide—six cast members, one director, and me—into two cars and head off. I ride with Amanda, Vanessa, and Katie in Amanda’s brother’s car, complete with USC sticker in the rear window, inside littered with clothes and sports equipment—the clothing is Amanda’s, abandoned after church last week; the sports equipment her brother's, who apparently plays hockey and stashes his stick in the back of his car.
As we cruise down Raley Drive, which skirts the southern border of the campus, a vehicle leaving campus from Sierra Towers, the men’s dormitory, pauses, seeming to wait for us to pass, then charges on into the road as we pass. For an instant, tires squeal, brakes lock, and there's a collective sharp intake of breath, but no damage beyond too much adrenaline and various expletives directed at bad drivers in general and drivers from Sierra Towers specifically. As the other car’s bumper was mere inches from the door at which I was sitting, I felt the expletives were entirely justified. After some feeble attempts on the other driver’s part to apologize and some post-event nervousness from Amanda, the car is silent for some minutes as we travel on and recompose ourselves.
It’s clear from watching the women who make up the cast interact that they, like the characters they are portraying on stage, have an excellent relationship with one another. Unlike their stage personas, however, these women are close in age and share a common La Sierra experience, so their closeness is even more understandable.
As the car navigates the temperamental afternoon Southern California traffic, I ask Katie what it’s like to be a “newbie” on the cast. Her answer is playful and directed at Vanessa, one of the veteran cast members: “They beat on me, especially Vanessa. She’s really mean.” Vanessa turns toward us from the front seat and rags on Katie. They’re like siblings who genuinely like one another, but who squabble for the fun of the conflict.
The other car’s occupants—Dahlie, Aarika, Jennifer, and Melissa—are waiting for us at Norm’s when we arrive. We pile into the booth and order—and the conversation begins.
“So, do we have to start talking in our accents?” Set in a small Louisiana town, Steel Magnolias practically requires cast members to adopt Southern accents, with varying degrees of convincingness. Some range from the genteel Aye-doo-deeclayer school of Southern accent to the more generic Southernesque drawl one would adopt when parodying the South. The accents themselves, however, don’t matter much when cast members begin throwing jokes and one-liners across the table to one another, little of it related directly to the play, but delivered in a persistent drawl intended to emphasize the sillyness.
As the women banter, they reveal much about themselves as individuals: Amanda, a junior, is quiet, nearly invisible, her bad week and near-accident affecting her interaction with the others. Beside her is Jennifer, the director and a graduating senior, who tosses out a few pointed quips, laughing and joking with her cast. Dahlie, a first-year English graduate student and easily the most vocal of the group, is very comfortable with her Southern accent, delivering naughty monologues that become increasingly humorous when one realizes her character is nearly the same, but some 50 years older.
Next to Dahlie is Melissa, an education graduate student, silent with laryngitis, but is still engaged in the conversation, occasionally gesturing or whispering to someone next to her, who’ll communicate the message to the rest of us. (Laryngitis is, someone jokes, the cast curse: last time, someone else also lost her voice and was forced to act to lines read from offstage.) Aarika, graduating with a masters in English, is the innocent-looking one that complements Dahlie’s double-entendres with a sharp and boisterous laugh. Vanessa, the only one at the table that could be considered an adult since she has a real job and isn’t in school, smiles and laughs at the rest of them; and, beside me sits Katie, the only lowerclassman and one of the newbie cast members, who’s a bit more shy amidst the others.
They start running lines as we wait for the food. Each woman holds a script, reading her lines, dropping character when it suits her, inserting lines and comments—Jennifer filling in for silent Melissa. This isn’t a serious rehearsal, just something to kill time, perhaps to entertain me. Yet, as they play, the script itself takes on a new character because it’s being shaped by these women who use the model before them, yet transform it into a reflection of this cast: they play up the ridiculous elements of the lines, hamming up their parts. Katie, playing Annelle, a woman married (or not—the character isn’t sure in the scene) to a never-seen Bunkie, takes to inserting his name at random spots in her lines because his name is funny—she proffers a impish smile every time she does so.
As they read, there are a few directorial comments from Jen, but the women shape their characters collaboratively: someone will ask why her character says a certain line—what’s the character’s motivation—and the others will chime in with suggestions. Thus each character, like a real person, is built by feedback from her friends, reshaping all the characters into individuals who not only fit together, but have a genuine relationship underlying the one portrayed on stage.
This isn’t the first time Jennifer has directed Steel Magnolias, hence the newbie and veteran cast members. Her sophomore year Jen led nearly the same cast, but this time, she said, the idea was “to do it better.” The first time she claims she was overambitious, that she didn’t understand the technical aspects of direction. She cited the second scene of the play as an example: the first time she directed the scene, she emphasized the movement in the scene rather than the emotion, the more powerful, and important, aspect. That oversight will be corrected this time around. This production, Jen offers, will be most different from the last one in the “actors’ movement on stage, the technical aspect of blocking.”
Because four of the six cast members are reprising their roles, I asked Jen if she had any concerns about veteran cast members playing their roles the same way they did before. Jen recalled a conversation she’d had with Melissa earlier about the same thing. Jen said that Melissa feels like she should be saying lines differently because she performed it one way before and it’s hard to make transition to new way of performing. “That’s probably something all the old cast members are struggling with. It’s amazing how long things stick in your mind,” Jen notes. The new cast members, however, challenge the veterans to think differently about their parts: the veterans must reorient themselves to the way the new cast members play their characters. The change in emphasis in Jen’s direction also helps break cast members out of the older characterizations.
As new cast members, Amanda and Katie echo Jen’s assessment: the new cast members sometimes find it difficult to really fit in with the veterans because of the others’ shared history. The veterans have an established way of doing things that the new cast members must break into. Jen’s very confident about her cast: “They’re a good ensemble cast; they work together as a group. The dynamic between the characters is interesting.”
After lunch, I join them for their Friday afternoon rehearsal back on campus. Jen said that they’d been working on blocking over the last few weeks, but that she wanted to do a read through of selected scenes since they’re going off-book, no longer using their scripts, next week.
As they wander, trying to find a room in which to rehearse, we pass the cast of Real Women Have Curves, the other La Sierra drama production this quarter, rehearsing in the lobby of South Hall. In an earlier interview, I’d asked Jen about competition for audience with Susan Gardner’s production. Jen dismissed any such notions between the productions: “I just hope people come to see both. Just to get more variety. A lot of people are proud of our drama program (at La Sierra), but most of them don’t come to see our drama. I just see it as another option to see all the talent we have on campus.”
We stand in the hall quietly and listen, sneaking peeks, then trickle up to the Honors dorm study room, one by one. The women sit around the table and record their rehearsal on an iPod, inserting breaks in the recording at the pickup lines to every entrance by a character. Unlike the lines they read in the restaurant, this rehearsal is more serious and focused. They only drop character occasionally and seldom insert lines or comments.
Because Melissa can’t read her lines, Jen again reads for her. Melissa lip-synchs to Jen’s reading, testing her knowledge of the lines. After awhile, Jen’s voice and Melissa’s mouth match surprisingly well, Melissa anticipating Jen’s pauses and cadence, movements and voice blending perfectly.
Despite the intensity of the rehearsal, something Aarika noted earlier becomes increasingly evident: the women’s laugher isn’t forced or pretend, but real. The play may be serious and contain tragedy, but it is the laughter at life that figures most prominently, and the cast is able to capture that feeling. When they laugh, it is born out of a depth of relationship and a joy in the language itself.
They rehearse and record for over an hour, chatting between recording sessions. The end of rehearsal, when it comes, is quiet and unremarkable: they finish recording, pack up their things, laugh and joke and, one by one, leave the room.
Steel Magnolias, written by Robert Harling, directed by Jennifer, plays May 20-23, 2004, in Matheson Chapel at La Sierra University in Riverside, CA. Tickets: $5 general admission, $3 with student ID. For more information, contact Jen.