Steel Magnolias is set in Truvy’s beauty salon in Chinquapin, Louisiana, where all the ladies who are “anybody” come to have their hair done. Filled with hilarious repartee and a few acerbic but humorously revealing verbal collisions, the play moves toward tragedy. The sudden realization of their mortality affects the women, but also draws on the underlying strength—and love—which give the play, and its characters, the special quality to make them truly touching, funny and marvelously amiable company in good times and bad.