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"I work out scene while running on a high-school track."

for /Crimes/, she worked at a computer company sorting parts. " It was fun playing with the jewel-y little things," she says. "I'd do /anything/ so as not to have to work" (by which, of course, she means work full time, in an office, under a bank of fluorescent lights.)
Looking at her, it's fascinating to imagine how she works on her plays, how the ideas come crowding into head. Short, small-boned, with long brown hair and wearing no make-up, she impresses by her utter lack of attempt to make an impression. The day I met her in her New York publicist's office, she was dressed in baggy pants and a long sleeved undershirt. Wool legs warmers hung in folds, covering most of her suede boots. For an hour she answered my questions carefully, as if she might have been articulating for the first time just how she goes about putting a play together.
"First, I think of a situation I want to write about," she said. "It can be something quite general, like a beauty contest, or a wake, or a dime-a-dance-hall. Then I try to think up some interesting characters. I take a lot of notes during this period. I carry index cards around in my bag. Before beginning to write the script I try to really /know/ my characters: what motivates them, what their dreams are. then I begin to work on the structure of the play, blocking out scenes. When all of this is done, I map out what's going to happen in each scene, what will be discussed."
Beth works and works on these scenes before she starts in on the dialogues. "When I'm home, in LA, I like to run at the high-school track. Often I'll work out scenes while I'm running."
By the time she's ready for the dialogue, it more or less just comes, she says. "I don't mean to sound like it isn't hard, though. Writing more or less full time, it took me three months to do the first draft of /Crimes of the Heart/ and two months to write the second draft."
The play was first produced in Louisville, in 1979, where it won the Louisville Actors Theater's Great American Play contest. Before coming to the Manhattan Theatre Club, last winter, it had had tree other regional productions--at the California Actors Theatre in Las Gatos, the Loretto-Hilton Repertory Theater in St. Louis, and Center Stage in Baltimore. Whlie all this was going on, Ms. Henley was madly writing more plays. /The Miss Firecracker Contest/ is soon to be performed at the Buffalo Studio Arena Stage. /The Wake of Jamey Foster,/ which Ulu Grossbard is to direct at the Hartford Stage Company in January, may move to New York in spring. In the meantime, the screenplay she wrote upon first coming to LA--/The Moonwatcher/--is being made a film to be directed by Jonathan Demme. (Burt Sugarman, who's producing the film version of /Crimes of the Heart,/ has just announced that it will star sissy Spacek and Sally Field.)
"You're very prolific," I say to her. "You have a lot of ideas." It amazes me to think that someone not yet 30 has done all of this.
Typically, she replies: "I don't have many ideas at all, so I have to be sure to work up the ones I do have."
Although he will state that /Crimes of the Heart/ is a good play, Beth Henley nevertheless seems a bit baffled by the degree of her success. "I was in Hartford last week and Ulu said to me, 'Beth, we've got to figure out what the point of this play is, meaning /The Wake of Jamey Foster,/ and I said, 'Ulu, I haven't the faintest idea what the point of it is,'"
She has, however, figured out what the point of /Crimes of the Heart/ is, if in retrospect. And when she says it, I remember the final frozen tableau of the beleaguered MacGrath sisters surprised by the moment of communal ecstasy. "The /point/ is," says Beth Henley, "that everything doesn't have to be wonderful for it to be wonderful."
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/Colette Dowling has examined her own and other women's psychological problems with dependency in the best seller,/ The Cinderella Complex: Women's Hidden Fear of Independence, /published by Summit Books.

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