Word: henley
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...MISS FIRECRACKER CONTEST. Holly Hunter, a strumpet-elf in tap shoes, walks onstage and twirls a rifle to the Star-Spangled Banner. Neither she nor Author Beth Henley misfires in this small-town carnival of a comedy...
...event next year, despite Harvard's new dragon boat, "Under the Ivy rules, any group can leave the country only once in four years, other than going to Canada," he said. Yet an annual exception is made for what Reardon called "special events" like the yearly races at Henley in England...
...Mississippi home town's annual Fourth of July celebration, she could easily become shrill in her eccentric quest, pathetic in her eventual failure. Hunter finds a sweet yet fierce core of integrity in this character that is not only very appealing but the source of the grip Beth Henley's play finally exerts on an audience...
Making a connection of that kind is an important service to Henley. Though her territory looks superficially like the contemporary American South, it is really a country of the mind: one of Tennessee Williams' provinces that has surrendered to a Chekhovian raiding party, perhaps. Her strength is a wild anecdotal inventiveness, but her people, lost in the ramshackle dreams and tumble-down ambitions with which she in vests them, often seem to be metaphors waywardly adrift. They are blown this way and that by the gales of laughter they provoke, and they frequently fail to find a solid connection...
...obviously the kinds of roles actors can happily chomp on, and they are all enthusiastically, even gratefully, played. If Director Stephen Tobolowsky's muse sometimes seems too busily antic for the cramped confines of the Manhattan Theater Club stage, his choices nevertheless represent a legitimate response to Henley's writing. On the whole, it is more vividly and crazily charged than it was in her Pulitzer-prizewinning Crimes of the Heart. In fact, in its cut-loose characterizations and brazen theatricality, Miss Firecracker is infinitely preferable to that rather pallid comedy...