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Theatre was a big part of life in the Henley Family
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through a marathon day full of revelations, all leading to the last frozen tableau in which the sisters have won something, a small but life-enhancing recognition. Crimes of the Heart is one of those plays whose final moment makes all the crazy antics that have gone before suddenly, magically coalesce. Watching, you can't put a name to what's happening, but you are flooded with the feeling of it, and it leaves you, as the curtain falls, quite joyous.

  *  *  *
Beth Henley grew up in a suburb of Jackson, Mississippi, about 15 minutes from "downtown." (The Hazelhurst of the play is a real town, her father's birthplace, about an hour down Route 51 from Jackson.) As the South has been the locus of all of her work so far, I asked her to tell me something she remembered from her childhood. She painted a summer scene: big trees, lazy streets, kids out riding their bikes after supper, or playing kick-the-can on the gravel churchyard across the street from the house in which she grew up. They ran in a gang, Beth, her three sisters, the neighborhood kids. There was innocence among them on hot summer nights.

There was also kindliness on the part of grownups. "When Dad went out for cigarettes at night he'd bring us back Hostess Cupcakes and Twinkies," Beth recalls. Their mother would let them paint pictures on the walls of one of the bedrooms in their homes. The only stipulation was that the kids wash down the walls when the time came to move.
"Is your mother lively?" I asked.
"Oh yes, very lively. She's an actress. When we were growing up she used to do a lot of plays for children. I remember how she'd come pick us up in the car somewhere and she'd be all covered with green paint from being Mr. Greenbean."

Her father, a lawyer, died when Beth was 26. The late Charles Henley, who served in both houses of the Mississippi legislature, got to read his daughter's play before he died, but never saw it produced.

Of Beth's three sisters, two are married[[end left column]]
[[right column]] and one, nine years younger than Beth, is going to Mississippi State. Beth's mother, Lydy Henley Caldwell, still lives in Jackson and still acts. "Right now she has a role in a feature film they're shooting back home. It's called The Beast Within. My mother is playing an old woman in a mental institution. They come to interview her to get information about her brother, who's a werewolf." Beth's eyes crinkle up and she bursts out laughing, as if envisioning a bunch of bureaucrats trying to get straight answers from an incarcerated woman about her werewolf brother (a distinctly Henley-esque situation).

Probably because their mother always worked in it, the theatre was a big part of life in the Henley family. One year all the children were taken to New York to visit the World's Fair, and they also saw all the top shows in town: Funny Girl; After the Fall; Hello, Dolly!

When she was a senior in high school, Beth enrolled in an acting workshop in Jackson's New Stage Theatre and then attended SMU in Dallas where she worked toward a degree in dramatic arts. "I think the plays I read in my theatre history courses probably had more influence on me later than anything else," she told me, mentioning Chekhov, O'Neill, Beckett, and Tennessee Williams as favorite playwrights.

After a brief stint at the University of Illinois, where she had intended to get a masters degree in acting ("It was a joke; I left when I recognized that where I should be is out there doing it."),Beth went to LA to do it. But finding acting jobs wasn't easy; even getting auditions wasn't easy. So she decided to do some writing. She started with a screenplay, and when she couldn't get it produced, she switched to plays. "You can always get some little theatre company to do your play. I thought I'd rather do that than keep on writing screenplays no one would ever see."

So she sat in her boyfriend's house in Los Angeles and wrote plays. When she needed money she'd find a part-time job. For three weeks, after finishing the script
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