`STEEL MAGNOLIAS': FUNNY AND MOVING (PLAY REVIEW)

When the River City Players' new production of "Steel Magnolias" begins, the first inclination is to think of Dolly Parton as you watch Tana Howard's Truvy sashay about her beauty salon. Same with Virginia Overholser's portrayal of Truvy's discombobulated assistant Annelle. That's not Daryl Hannah. Where's Julia Roberts? Sally Field? Shirley MacLaine?

The movie version of this Robert Harling play was so popular and so wonderfully executed as to make the job of creating a new version daunting. To the great credit of Howard, Overholser and the other four actresses on stage, those thoughts quickly disappear. This is their "Steel Magnolias" and it's a funny and moving one.

"Steel Magnolias," which opens tonight at the River City Yacht Club, tells a story of the joy and tragedy experienced by the extended family whose lives are known to us through their conversations in a Southern beauty shop. There, and probably not when men are around, they talk about how much they sweat, the neighbor's gay son, watching a loved one die and whatever else is really important in Chinquapin, La.

Howard is a veteran River City Players performer who grandly spreads Truvy's down-home wit and wisdom from sink to hair dryer. "Time marches on and eventually it marches across your face," she says with a big smile. Truvy almost always smiles, even when she ought to cry.

"Overholser, a Central High School senior, appeared in dual roles in last year's production of "Greater Tuna." She easily makes the transitions from Annelle's nervously ticky introduction to the creator of garish Christmas trees to the fundamentalist who prays in the salon.

Good performances by these actresses could have been expected. The revelations of the play are the other four, none of whom ever have appeared in a River City Players production before.

Karen Honaas is hilarious as the irascible Ousier, belching and disagreeing when anyone thinks things couldn't get worse. "Sure they could," she says.

Lee Ann Wright as M'Lynn and Tonya Wells as Shelby are good together as the mother and daughter whose duel of wills is central to the play's tragedy. Wright may turn on the River City Yacht Club's sprinkler system with her monologue at play's end. Wells is just right as the doomed Shelby, fiery and frail and not a bit sorry for herself.

Carolyn Simpson as Clairee, the moneyed widow of the mayor, has the play's most acerbic lines, all the more potent when delivered in a honeyed Southern accent. One of the play's great tragi-comic moments is hers, a scene in which Clairee encourages a grieving mother to take a punch at Ouiser because it might make her feel better.

The timing of the banter between the women in Truvy's Beauty Shop is essential to the success of "Steel Magnolias," and director George Kralemann has the scenes popping with life.

There is a moment in "Steel Magnolias" when time stands still. M'Lynn is describing how Shelby entered the world and how she left it, a profound experience only a woman can really know. Every actress on the stage was crying. And those tears were real.