Word: henley
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...ought easily to fill his cell, but he seems to have willed a diminished appearance in order to stay in proportion with his furnishings. Most of these hang on the walls: a chain of beads, a pair of sunglasses, snapshots of his three children. He has copied William Ernest Henley's poem "Invictus" by hand and mounted it with cellophane tape. There is a picture postcard of a sailboat at sunset below what Sy calls his "mind stimulators," words of advice on how best to study: SURVEY, QUESTION, READ, REVIEW, RECITE. Between the postcard and the sunglasses lies...
Audiences are doing just that, and critics too. Crimes of the Heart, Henley's first full-length play, brought her a Broadway hit and a Pulitzer Prize-she keeps the certificate in a desk drawer. Out of another drawer came Am I Blue, a one-acter she wrote as a sophomore at Southern Methodist University; it recently opened at Manhattan's Circle Repertory Company. The Miss Firecracker Contest, her second full-length play, has completed a successful run at Buffalo's Studio Arena Theater; and her latest, strongest play, The Wake of Jamey Foster, is charming theatergoers...
Pure for sure, but deceptively simple. Each of her plays pries the audience's eyes open with an outrageous act, then makes them crinkle with laughter and moisten, just a bit, as Henley's daffy women reveal their desires and fears with slumber-party bravado. By the end of the evening, caricatures have been fleshed into characters, jokes into down-home truths, domestic atrocities into strategies for staying alive. Not bad for a young woman who, until three years ago, was eking out her stalled career as a Los Angeles actress by sitting at her kitchen table...
...Beth Henley the person had not existed, Beth Henley the playwright might have invented her. Beneath that quiet exterior, there is the same flamboyance of spirit, the same belief that a crazy quilt of sweet dreams and common sense will somehow keep you warm through the night. Beth's father was a lawyer from Hazlehurst, Miss, (the scene of Crimes), her mother an amateur actress from down the road in Brookhaven (where Firecracker is set). "I was real shy when I was little," Henley says in a molasses drawl just slightly diluted by her years in Los Angeles...
...Henley still lives in West Hollywood, in a rented house unrefurnished by success, with Actor Stephen Tobolowsky, who played a dog sweeper in Firecracker and a turkey jerker in Jamey Foster. Last year she herself appeared as a bag lady in a radical farce at Los Angeles' Odyssey Theater: "It keeps my childlike spirit alive to go out and do something really strange." When her schedule permits, she attends boxing matches at the Olympic Auditorium, goes to Dodger games or listens to jazz at the Parisian Room. And she still goes home to Jackson, though "it's different...