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INVESTIGATING "CRIMES"
 A look at the Pulitzer Prize play Crimes of the Heart and it's 29-year-old playwright Beth Henley
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There are enough struggling playwrights around to make you recognize that it must be hard to write a good play. Or it must take a special kind of person, a unique talent, someone who finds life's hilarity falling neatly into scenes, someone (ah, maybe this is it) who actually loves people. (Certainly, if you are going to move people to recognize the crimes within their own hearts--and to sympathize with themselves-- you are going to have to have compassion.)

Beth Henly's [[italics]] Crimes of the Heart [[/italics]] is a good play. In fact it has won its 29-year-old author so many awards (culminating,last spring, with the Pulitzer Prize for Drama) that if she wanted to, she could frame them and cover a wall with them, like doctor's diplomas. But at the moment she doesn't seem to be too interested in the credentials she's accrued. If anything, she has a healthy wariness about what it might do to distort audience expectation. "I don't want them coming to the theatre hoping for too much," she says matter-of-factly. "I'd like them to be able to just come and judge the play for what it is." 

What it is is a very funny and very poignant plunge into the lives of three beleaguered young women, sisters, in the small town of Hazelhurst, Mississippi. The women, in their twenties, are a motley lot: one tense and turning spinsterish, one infantile and self absorbed. The action that involves them takes place about 1970, and at first, because of the odd way the sisters' words rush out, and their loose, childish way of making associations, because of the peculiar events of their lives (Mama hung herself, along with the family cat; the youngest daughter, Babe, has just shot her husband because she doesn't like the way he looks), you don't quite see what it is these people have to do with you. It is the gift of the playwright, however, to have woven a tale so entrancing that by play's end you see precisely what these people have to do with you. And beecause you have made that connection, seen what it is that you and they share, the struggling MaGrath sisters are not "merely three cracked Southern belles" (as Clive Barnes described them, in his review of the Manhattan Theatre Club production, a year ago). What you have just witnessed is not "a daffy comedy about four nitwit sisters" (as Douglas Watt, who apparently can't count, put in his first review). No, what you have is far closer to what the Pulitzer Committee described as "a play rich with wisdom about the way people respond to life." Personally, I felt as if I were sitting in someone's big Southern kitchen going

by Colette Dowling
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copyright Lorillard, U.S.A, 1982