Southern Sibs

By T.E. Kalem

CRIMES OF THE HEART by Beth Henley

This is a tale of three sisters. One is a spinster, one is a sexpot, and one is a screwball. The tangled web of relationships they weave possesses sprightly humor, zany logic, folksy warmth and a tincture of poignancy. The author's first full-length play and a Pulitzer prizewinner, Crimes of the Heart is a kind of in-depth soap opera that reveals character even as it unravels situations.

The locale is Hazelhurst, Miss., and the time is "five years after Hurricane Camille," Playwright Henley's little hint that this clan is disaster-prone. Lenny MaGrath (Lizbeth Mackay), the eldest sister, is facing her 30th birthday with "a shrunken ovary" and no gentlemen callers in sight. She is plain of face, finicky in manner and gnawed by self-doubt. She had a heartfelt romance once but skittered away from it in fear and put her emotions in a deep freeze. The kind of event that nails her hysterically to her sun-drenched kitchen wall and illustrates Henley's predilection for bizarre Southern Gothic extravagance is the death of her horse Billy Boy. Her pet since childhood, Billy Boy has recently been struck by lightning. To top that calamity, Old Granddaddy has been hospitalized with "blood vessels popping in his brain."

The sexpot sister Meg (Mary Beth Hurt) knows all about men ("I've had too many") but astonishingly little about herself. She rushed off to Hollywood because Old Granddaddy fostered the delusion that she could be a singing star. She became a pill-popping swinger and had a mental breakdown. The scar tissue shows in hard-boiled mannerisms and a terror of displaying "weakness."

At 24, the youngest sister Babe Botrelle (Mia Dillon) has reached full immaturity. She is out on bail after having shot her husband in the stomach and very nearly killing him. Asked why she did it, Babe replies, "I didn't like his looks." Prior to the attempted murder, Babe had been carrying on an affair with a 15-year-old black boy. Asked to explain that, Babe answers, "I was so lonely and he was gooood."

What insane lawyer would take such a devil of a case? The sisters find him in an Ole Miss grad (Peter MacNicol) who was smitten with Babe when she once served him pound cake at a church bazaar. Besides, he relishes "personal vendettas."

MacNicol is a comic minefield. His meticulous legalisms are at total variance with his discombobulated manner. He wears his clothes as if they were still on the rack.

He walks like an unstrung robot, and his voice seems to come from a retarded answering service.

Out of such recalcitrant, semitragic, and seemingly implausible materials, Henley wrests combustible spasms of laughter. Perhaps she makes playgoers see their own catastrophes as others see them.

She is lucky to hold ace cards in her casting hand. Mackay, Hurt and Dillon seem to have been born under the same roof, sharing a past, a present and a future.

They give the play a dimension of humanity that redeems the occasional lapse into cliches and arch frivolity. It is interesting to speculate about whether Crimes of the Heart would seem so antic in spirit if its lines were delivered in the brisk, flinty inflections of Bangor, Me., instead of the languorous resonances of Hazelhurst, Miss. But that is idle speculation, since Hazelhurst is so beguiling.

--By T.E. Kalem

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