If your most salient memory of“Steel Magnolias”involves a great big healthy cry and purging all that’s bottled up inside you, that still happens in TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s production of Robert Harling’s play, on which the 1989 movie starring Sally Field, Dolly Parton and Julia Roberts was based.

But Elizabeth Carter’s production, which opened Saturday, June 10, at Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, isn’t weepy. Truvy’s beauty parlor in the fictional Chinquapin, La., is confession booth, therapist’s couch and site of intergenerational exchange, but also fertile comedic ground where six whip-smart female actors make hay.

Harding’s one-liners could keep pace with a Noël Coward or Neil Simon text, but his come laced with Crystal Hot Sauce. “There’s no such thing as natural beauty,” Truvy says near the top, and in Lisa Strum’s shrewd delivery, it’s with the deadly seriousness of a bedrock religious burden only the strong can accept. Later, when she describes a hunk who has “a body that doesn’t stop anywhere,” Strum’s knit brows and searching eyes make clear that that body still hasn’t stopped.

Men are kept offstage in this play, and one of its delectable running themes is how useless and destructive the male species is. They’re a bit of a mystery — why the husband of newcomer Annelle (Alexandra Lee) is such a no-goodnik, why the husband of M’Lynn (Dawn L. Troupe) and father of Shelby (Jasmine Milan Williams) thinks it’s a good idea to shoot and detonate explosives on birds on Shelby’s wedding day, why Truvy’s husband hasn’t moved from his perch in front of the TV set in 15 years.

But the women don’t waste their time pondering the unknowable; they’ve long realized that their menfolk aren’t worth the brain cells. Rather, what gets Marcia Pizzo’s impish Clairee up in the morning is the possibility of tormenting Nancy Carlin’s galumphing Ouiser; the pair are thorn and overinflated balloon. Truvy lives for gossip, and in playing the character, Strum turns from human to bloodhound each time someone’s about to spill the tea.

Then there’s Williams’ Shelby, whose wedding day begins the play, and whose sheer joy in being alive ratchets up the show’s stakes. She’s the star in the sky under which everyone else basks, which tasks Troupe’s M’Lynn with keeping her daughter from burning too brightly lest she extinguish herself. Troupe carries that weight quietly and inwardly, with a kind of vortex of worry and martyrdom that makes everyone around her shush.

The show’s one misstep is at its apex of tragedy, when a weird vibe onstage undercuts the sorrow (and not just from a humming, whistling noise from an unidentified source that kept piping in throughout opening night). Troupe plays M’Lynn as someone who always holds things in, no matter what, but some characters are seeing each other for the first time since horrible news has struck, and here they react as if they’re in a sitcom. A tidy, reset-to-stasis happy ending is foreordained; full human beings aren’t processing life in the moment. The show eventually lets us feel our feelings, but it’s not all it might be.

Elsewhere, though, this “Steel Magnolias” reveals itself anew. Carter’s cast comprises Black, white and Asian American actors, and while the Black characters might steal a knowing glance here and there when Ouiser displays outlandish (even for her) privilege, the biggest effect of a multiracial “Steel Magnolias” might be more implicit. It really could happen, this show insists, for women of different races to come together like sisters in the South in the ‘80s. All that’s holding us back from such a world is our cynicism and lack of imagination.

Forget the summits and panels; cross-racial understanding might begin in the salon chair.

Reach Lily Janiak:ljaniak@sfchronicle.com