ORONO — Stillwater Stage, a new theater company founded this year by University of Maine students and recent graduates, presented one of the area’s most vibrant and compelling productions of 1997. Over the weekend, the fledgling company tackled Beth Henley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Crimes of the Heart” at the Al Cyrus Pavilion Theatre on campus.

Henley’s play is the hysterically funny and touching story of the Magrath sisters — Lenny, Meg and Babe — and the crisis that reunites them in their Hazelhurst, Miss., home. When Babe is arrested for shooting her husband, Meg returns from Los Angeles to help Lenny cope with the fallout. Their story unfolds in the large, sunny kitchen of their childhood home.

Their cousin, Chick Boyle, who lives next door, constantly reminds them that they are the poor, pitiful relations taken in and cared for by Ol’ Granddaddy. Meg’s first love, Doc Porter, and Babe’s lawyer, Barnett Lloyd, complete the cast of characters seen onstage.

But, hovering over the stage, constantly tugging at these women’s souls, is the ghost of their mother. When the three were young, she hanged herself, along with the family cat, in the basement of Ol’ Granddaddy’s house. As children they were objects of the town’s pity and ridicule. As adults, they struggle to comprehend her actions.

Director Elaine DiFalco, in her first attempt at directing a full-length play, captured the heart and soul of Henley’s characters and her play. The great pitfall for New Englanders presenting stories about the South is the temptation to fall back on outlandish and cartoonish stereotypes.

DiFalco successfully avoided this temptation and led her actors, with one exception, to the heart and soul of Henley’s characters, without ridiculing their roots. As the play ended, it was difficult to believe that the three actresses portraying the Magrath siblings were not real sisters. That is how well DiFalco cast and directed “Crimes of the Heart.”

Mary Varney, a senior at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Penn., played Lenny, who, as the play opens, is celebrating her 30th birthday alone. Lenny is the shy, plain Magrath. As the eldest, she is the one forced to be sister and mother to her younger siblings, as well as caregiver to her ill and aging grandfather. According to her cousin, Lenny is quickly becoming an old maid due to her shrunken ovary.

In the hands of a less capable actress, Lenny could have been a pitiful whiner. But as portrayed by Varney, she was a tower of strength, who stood up for herself and her family. In the end, she refused to be pushed around by anyone. Varney was at her best as the outraged older sister for whom all slights go back to childhood. Her rantings over her birthday box of chocolates were very funny, but rang true for every audience member who had ever been blessed with a sibling.

Meg, as portrayed by Deborah Elz, was the woman incapable of leaving her past behind, no matter how far she ran. Elz captured all the character’s hard and brassy edges, as well as her soft, vulnerable center. Like the hurricane that once devastated Hazelhurst, Meg is a wild, uncontrollable force who leaves devastation in her wake. Elz harnessed all that energy, as well as the calm, quiet center that makes this character so human.

Babe, the youngest of the three sisters, is flighty and delicate. She shoots her abusive husband because she “didn’t like his looks,” then laments the fact that she will get only statewide press coverage, where her mother’s suicide made national news.

Catherine Mary Moroney, a graduate student at Drexel University, became Babe completely. The porcelain features of the actress perfectly portrayed the open vulnerability of Babe as well as the manipulative use of her feminine charms to beguile those around her. Moroney also captured the character’s zest for life, her steely inner strength and her delicate hold on her own sanity.

Sometimes the stereotypes are true, and Henley’s Chick is the social-climbing, small-town Southern Belle stereotype brought hysterically to life. Jennifer Drew stole every scene she was in. Not one of the playwright’s comic moments slipped past her, and she handled them all with a deftness reminiscent of Lucille Ball. A senior at UM, she is an actress well worth watching.

Barrett Hammond, as Doc Porter, and Sean A. Fidler, as Barnette Lloyd, were the only men in this sea of strong, dynamic women brought to life by strong, dynamic actresses. While they held their own onstage in this tempest, only Hammond succeeded in equaling their ability to create real and believable characters.

Hammond, co-artistic director of Stillwater Stage, brought a quiet, steady presence onstage each time Doc stepped into the Magrath kitchen. Yet there, just under the surface, boiled his only passion — Meg. His love for her, despite her desertion and his subsequent marriage to someone else, bubbled and boiled over. Married off stage, Hammond and Elz made sparks fly whenever Doc and Meg were together.

Despite his best efforts, Fidler never quite grasped the soul of Southern gentleman Lloyd. A young, inexperienced lawyer, he agrees to defend Babe because her husband ruined his father’s career. Fidler’s portrayal was more that of a slick, big-city, Yankee shyster than the quiet, determined intellectual out to restore honor to his father’s name that Henley wrote. It is this concept of honor, an essential part of every Southern male’s marrow, that Fidler failed to portray.

Thanks to the furniture and kitchen oddities donated by Millriver Antiques of Harrington, Daniel Daugherty’s set design became a place where the heart of this family resided. While totally functional, the knickknacks and bric-a-brac made the kitchen real and alive. Jeremy Leclerc’s lighting design complemented the setting and the actors brilliantly.

Sometimes students do their best work not with their professors, but with their peers. That was the case with “Crimes of the Heart.” Stillwater Stage will be dark until next summer, when it will resume production. The vibrancy and energy of this fledgling company deserves support.