Allan Appel Photo
Victoria Johnson as Truvy cuts the hair of Lauryn Darden, as Clairee, in rehearsal.
The male director didn’t know much about the culture of beauty parlors in general, and even less about black women’s salons and their hairstyles and how you use hot tools to achieve those big hairdos popular in the distant past of the 1980s.
The actors — all teenagers — had never operated such an ancient device as a rotary telephone and honestly didn’t know which button to push to send the call. Most also had never seen an old-fashioned coffee table ashtray.
So Co-Op Arts and Humanities High School teacher/director Rob Esposito, his six young actors, and the supporting crew taught each other.
Esposito with 2010 Co-Op grad Briana Bellinger-Dawson, back as stage manager for the show.
The result is an affecting production of Steel Magnolias, the moving, funny 1987 play about six Southern women whose refuge to be themselves, without bothersome men around, is a Louisiana beauty parlor.
It’s up for a short run this week at Co-Op High Wednesday and Thursday, Oct. 25 and 26, at 2:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m., with tickets available both at the box office or by booking in advance at this website.
Esposito, who’s directed hundreds of plays in his long career at the school, put Steel Magnolias way high on his list of “guilty pleasures.” It’s a plays he’d always wanted to bring to life perhaps for personal, nostalgic, even goofy reasons. However, because most school productions need to provide roles for lots of kids, this six-hander was never possible.
Up to now. To his surprise, when Esposito submitted the proposal to the school’s play selection committee, it was accepted right away and rehearsals began at the start of the school year.
When the results of the all-school audition process played out, the six best actors for the roles turned out all to be all minority young women, five African-American and one Latina.
Genuine “hot tools” from a black salon, one of the key props.
They completely connected to the voices and world of the six white women who gather regularly in Truvy Jones’s beauty parlor in Chinquapin Parish, Louisiana to cheer on their marriages, careers, family life, and, toward the end of the play, comfort and support each other at the death of one of their number.
Senior creative writing major Lauryn Darden, who plays Clairee, a wealthy lady who has her hair done at the parlor, said in her own writing and in her writing heroes, like Spike Lee, she admires “social injustice stories, anything to do with empowering women. That’s why I like Steel Magnolias I feel it’s women’s voices telling stories of women.”
This devil’s‑advocate reporter pointed out that a lot of the humor of the play comes from the one-after-the-other one-liners and quick repartee of the dialogue, much of which is often the women being nitpicky about each other’s manners and choices. This material could be interpreted as the opposite of empowering.
Darden didn’t disagree. However, she asserted that even all that banter, petty as it sometimes can be, in the absence of men, is empowering. “It’s the freedom of expressing, even if it’s a complaint. There’s power in the simple expression,” she said. Darden also described the world of the beauty parlor as a kind of comfort zone of “no judgment,” in spite of the jokey criticisms.
“If a man judges a woman, his intentions are always negative,” she added. Not so in the beauty parlor of Steel Magnolias.
Esposito: Actors had to get used to the idea of not knowing who’s calling.
Director Esposito didn’t weigh in on that particular point, but he and his actors wanted to be sure the sense of women’s power they all agree is at the heart of the play would not be diminished because of the casting.
The play, written for six white women in the South, now features African-American women. And an African-American beauty parlor is not the same as one for whites. You do your hair differently, as the women in the cast and crew fairly quickly schooled their director in.
“All the girls had stories to tell about being burned by hot combs,” Esposito said, referring to the curling iron, combs, and other “hot tools” you find for hair styling in a black salon.
The parents of one crew member contributed an actual set of hot tools, along with early space-age looking hair dryers that now enliven a fantastically yellow, green, loudly beautiful set.
That was only the beginning of suggestions, along with contributions of props from cast and crew members and their families. Stage Manager Briana Bellinger has two aunts in their 90s living in New Haven, who, she knew, had copies of African-American magazines like Ebony and Jet from the 1960s carrying cover stories about the assassination of Martin Luther King and other red-letter events in American history, of special significance to African-Americans.
The beauty parlor at Co-Op High now has photocopies of some of those rare magazines on the wall from Bellinger’s two great aunts, Bessie Duncan, 98, and Harriet Davis, 93. The great aunts were happy to lend the magazines, but they made Bellinger promise to return the originals completely intact or “I would get it,” Bellinger reported.
Because so much of the physical action in the beauty parlor is one actor fixing the hair of another, another of Co-Op’s recent graduates, now a professional stylist, came in and mentored the actors on how to do it the right way, in the style of the 1980s.
“We went over the teasing. There was big hair in black salons, but no [actual] teasing [of the hair],” Bellinger added.
And where in several places in the script the beauty parlor talk brings up gorgeous hair icons of the 1980s, like Princess Grace Kelly, Esposito’s female crew and the cast came up with appropriate substitues: great black hair icons, like Whitney Houston, among others.
Strange historical artifacts from the 1980s beauty parlor.
Shelby, the about-to-be-married young woman beauty parlor client, has a diabetic fade-out in one of the chairs; complications of diabetes and pregnancy lead to — spoiler alert — the tragedy at the end of the comedy. The crew also had available another student who manages her own diabetes to explain what happens during diabetic seizure so the actors would handle that realistically.
“It’s not about shaking, it’s more about being spaced out,” Esposito reported.
Clearly thrilled that one of his life-long guilty pleasures is being brought to life, and uniquely so, Esposito concluded: “The actors are all finding their truths.” By that he meant far more than truths about hair.
In addition to Victoria Johnson as Truvy and Lauryn Darden as Clairee, the other four steel magnolias are Cynthia Morales as Annelle, the ingenue hair stylist; Selaiha Peterkin as diabetic Shelby; Jaezmyne Pheanais-Browne as her mom M’Lynn; and Tierra Williams-Ranciato as curmudgeonly but lovable Quiser. Steel Magnolias runs at Co-Op High, 177 College St., Oct. 25 and 26. Tickets are $4 for students and $8 for adults in advance, $10 at the door.