Director, actresses breathe some ‘Life’ into formulaic script

Think of “The Cover of Life” as a kind of Louisiana gumbo, made up of equal parts fried green tomatoes, the ya-ya sisterhood and steel magnolias.

You might call it the feisty-Southern-women genre. “The Cover of Life,” by R.T. Robinson, fits easily into that well-trodden formula – maybe a little too easily. If you are looking for a script that goes beyond “colorful” Southern stereotypes and the familiar clichés about strong women and no-good menfolk, this is not that script.

However, the ensemble cast of “The Cover of Life” are able to make parts of this story come alive. Under Susan Hardie’s skilled direction, these six actresses (plus one actor in a smaller role) are full of laughter, sass and life.

Or should we say, full of Life, as in, magazine. The premise of this 1991 play is that a Life magazine reporter, Kate Miller (Sara Nicholls) has been sent to the tiny hamlet of Sterlington, La., in 1943 to do a feature about women on the home front.

The three Clifford brothers joined up on the same day, and their three young wives moved in with the boys’ mother to keep expenses down while the boys are away. Miller, who has been a war correspondent, is resigned to a fluffy “women’s feature.” What she finds instead are three women who are fighting and clawing amongst themselves.

That sounds promising enough. However, Robinson’s script is marred by too many two-dimensional characters, too many confused motivations and far too many clichés. In this play, the excitement is never just “thick,” but “thick enough to cut with a knife.” A person is not just barren, but as “barren as the Sahara Desert.”

Several scenes come across as simply headshaking. Toward the end of the play, Aunt Ola (the mother-in-law, played by Susan Creed) comes out of the kitchen with a gun and threatens the women in the dining room because … well, because she’s feisty.

By the way, if you think none of these characters will die during the course of this play, then you don’t understand the genre.

In the end, Robinson tries to wrap things up by showing that one of the wives, Tood (Tanya Morton), has learned something about independence from the citified Life reporter. But the Life reporter has learned something, too – about, you know, life.

The ending was anticlimactic, but this cast managed to make many of the individual scenes come alive. A picnic scene between Tood and Kate was smartly acted and cleverly directed by Hardie.

I was especially impressed with Nicholls, who brought a strong, worldly Rosalind Russell-like presence to the role of the reporter.

As Sybil, the “bad” wife among the three, Lauren Waterbury was devilishly sly. She drank and cussed and shot thunderbolts from her eyes.

Melanie Simka was believable and single-minded as the stolid, God-fearing wife, Weetsie. Morton expressed a more girlish innocence as Tood. Creed managed to be both wise and acerbic as Aunt Ola.

I wish this play had more to say on the subject of the women left behind at wartime. However, it does deliver the goods when it comes to what one of the women refers to as “girl talk” – especially about the timeless subject of unsatisfactory men.