Word: henley
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Playwright Beth Henley, 29, parlays down-home truths into hits...
Sugar and spice and every known vice-that's what Beth Henley's plays are made of. The Delta ladies who inhabit Henley's comic universe can be found a few miles south of Jackson, Miss., and just this side of Bananas. There is Babe Botrelle, whose Crimes of the Heart are to shoot her piggish husband (because "I just didn't like his looks") and to keep close company with a 15-year-old black boy. Popeye Jackson, from The Miss Firecracker Contest, knits tiny jumpsuits for frogs and "can hear voices through my eyes...
Crimes of the Heart. Three sisters, nurtured in Southern gothic grotesquerie, induce spasms of laughter in Beth Henley's Pulitzer-prizewinning drama. Dreamgirls. A pearl in the strand of notable U.S. musicals. There is dazzling elegance in Theoni V. Aldredge's costumes, and a young belter named Jennifer Holliday can start, stop and steal a show. (See above.) The Dresser. Paul Rogers plays a decrepit provincial Shakespearean actor-manager; Tom Courtenay, his valet. In double image, they are Lear and his Fool-and both are magnificent...
...locale is Hazelhurst, Miss., and the time is "five years after Hurricane Camille," Playwright Henley's little hint that this clan is disaster-prone. Lenny MaGrath (Lizbeth Mackay), the eldest sister, is facing her 30th birthday with "a shrunken ovary" and no gentlemen callers in sight. She is plain of face, finicky in manner and gnawed by self-doubt. She had a heartfelt romance once but skittered away from it in fear and put her emotions in a deep freeze. The kind of event that nails her hysterically to her sun-drenched kitchen wall and illustrates Henley...
...such recalcitrant, semitragic, and seemingly implausible materials, Henley wrests combustible spasms of laughter. Perhaps she makes playgoers see their own catastrophes as others see them...