‘Dixie Swim Club’: Southern ‘dramedy’ promises audiences will laugh, cry
Brookhaven Little Theatre presents “The Dixie Swim Club” opening Friday, a southern “dramedy” that will have audiences laughing and crying.
Show times are 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, March 7 and 8, and March 14 and 15, with one matinee on Sunday, March 9, at 2 p.m. Tickets are $10 at the door. Performances will be at the Haven Theatre, located at 126 West Cherokee St.
The theater will open 30 minutes before performance times. The play is in two acts and lasts approximately two hours with a 10-minute intermission.
Copiah-Lincoln Community College band director Shaw Furlow is the play’s director. Sherri Mathis is the assistant director.
The play is about five southern women whose friendships began in their college years on a swim team together and who went on to set aside a long weekend every August to recharge those relationships.
Free from husbands, kids and jobs, they meet at the same beach cottage to catch up, laugh and meddle in each other’s lives.
The play spans a period of 33 years.
Sheree, played by Sue Junkin, the spunky swim team captain, desperately tries to maintain her organized and “perfect” life, and continues to be the group’s leader.
Dinah, played by Mandy Dann, is the wisecracking overachiever and a career dynamo, but her victories in the courtroom are in contrast to the frustrations of her personal
life.
Lexie, played by Julie Perry, is pampered and outspoken and she is determined to hold onto her looks and youth as long as possible. She enjoys being married – over and over and over again.
The self-deprecating and acerbic Vernadette, played by Deanna Ezell, acutely aware of the dark cloud that hovers over her life, has decided to just give in and embrace the chaos.
And sweet, eager-to-please Jeri Neal, played by Shelley Harrigill, experiences a late entry into motherhood that takes them all by surprise.
As the women’s lives unfold and the years pass, they increasingly rely on one another to get through the challenges that life flings at them.
And, when fate throws a wrench into one of their lives in the second act, the friends, proving the enduring power of “teamwork,” rally around their own with the strength and love that takes this comedy in a poignant and surprising direction.
To learn more about productions at Brookhaven Little Theatre, go to their website at www.haventheatre.org.