Comment on this story What: Crimes of the Heart When: Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays thru Aug. 7, 8 p.m. Where: Black Box Theatre, Homberg Place Cost: $15 adults, $10 students/seniors, $5 every Thursday. Call 909-9300 for reservations.

Actors Co-op produces a masterpiece

by Paige M. Travis

The kitchen is the universal setting for female domesticity. Cooking, cleaning, gabbing on the phone are all socially accepted and expected activities for women. Women stay home, preferably in the kitchen, keeping things in order, staying out of trouble. But the Magrath sisters throw all mores of respectability and refinement out the window in the hilarious and heartbreaking Crimes of the Heart. And it all happens in the kitchen.

Beth Henley’s play is just as remarkable today as it was in 1981 when it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Although Crimes is set in 1974, not a word sounds out of date. The intervening 30 years have improved women’s situations at home and in the workplace vastly. Still, Henley’s story of three sisters struggling with family issues has a broader scope and commentary on women in American society that holds true today.

David Brian Alley, directing his first Actors Co-op play in four years, says one critic has noted that where most plays build into one major dramatic climax, Crimes takes place wholly inside the state of climax. Henley’s genius is how she breaks that tension time and again without diminishing the seriousness of what’s come before. Just when the story is at its most bleak, the characters find a reason to laugh, and the audience does too.

At the outset, Babe Magrath, 24, is being charged with attempted murder for shooting her husband. Meg, 27, returns home from California where she ran away to attempt a singing career. And Lenny is marking a lonely 30th birthday by making wishes on a candle stuck atop a cookie. Even before we learn that their mother hung herself in the basement, it’s clear these sisters are a holy disaster.

Henley’s characterization of the female siblings perfectly fulfills the birth order types: Lenny (Sarah Campbell) is put-upon; Meg (Katie Norwood Alley) is the wild child; and Babe (Mary Alice Skalko) is the please-everyone peacemaker. This is a trio of black sheep with no solid role models. Their only male relative, Granddaddy, while never seen, still exerts an incredible amount of control over the women. Lenny is Granddaddy’s caretaker, basically a replacement for his dead wife. In order to retain her servitude, he’s convinced her that she’ll never find a man because of her “shrunken ovary,” a medical condition of dubious reality that may or may not affect her ability to have children. Of course, no man would ever want a woman who can’t reproduce, motherhood being the defining factor of womanhood. Lenny is unaware of the manipulation until Meg—the symbol of independence—mocks “old Granddaddy” and reveals his true motives.

First cousin Chick (Justina Batchleor) is a source of prim disapproval. She lectures Lenny on the repercussions of Babe’s crime, but she seems to care only how the fallout will affect her social status. Chick is the victim of what serves as satisfaction in Henley’s bleak world—a violent broomstick whupping.

Crimes has all the marks of a literary classic: symbolism, allusions to mythology, name significance, family curses and timeless social and familial relevance. These new Furies ask us to consider insanity, murder and revenge as they pertain to women in the context of contemporary society.

Babe’s situation is the most compelling. Married to a lawyer and running with the small town’s upper crust ladies, she is most confined by society’s expectations; and she breaks with them most radically. Her illicit relationship with a 15-year-old black boy symbolizes the dangers of women’s sexual freedom. Henley equates the “radical” concept of women seeking and receiving sexual pleasure with something that’s illegal and immoral, implying that both activities are equally repugnant.

On its surface, Crimes is valuable for its portrayal of human emotions. Even as we might condemn the sisters, each is worth our sympathy. Their internal conflicts—guilt, confusion, competition, obligation—are all so well conveyed by the actors that these characters start to seem less fictional and more like people we know, or people we are.

Heidi Krug’s costumes are on the mark, establishing in shorthand the sisters’ personalities. Lenny is frumpy in her ‘70s flowered housedress and constant apron. Meg is West Coast chic with sunglasses that remain perched atop her blonde tousled hair. And sweet Babe—the most innocent and most guilty—looks permanently dressed for church in her demure frocks dotted with tiny flowers.

The actors nail every word of the perfectly crafted script. Every syllable of Henley’s dialogue bears significance and importance; there are no throwaway lines, and the actors handle them like jewels, creating a seamless flow of action and speech, building tension and breaking it at the last moment with laughter that spreads into the audience. Campbell, Norwood Alley and Skalko play into their types without falling into stereotypes; they let a range of emotions and realizations transform their responses and body language. Only as the busybody Chick does Batchleor get to be wholly and enjoyably one-dimensional.

The male actors do wonders with peripheral, emasculated roles: Buddy Lucas as Doc Porter, Meg’s married ex-boyfriend whom she abandoned in Biloxi during Hurricane Camille; and a mesmerizing Justin Rubenstein as Barnette Lloyd, the young lawyer who has a “vendetta” against Babe’s husband and a soft spot for Babe herself.

Despite their collective faults, the sisters are stronger together than apart, a theme that supports the importance of family over all other societal structures as well as the strength of women who support each other instead of break each other down.

“Life sure can be miserable,” Babe says. But Crimes of the Heart proves it can also be sweet and hilarious.

July 22, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 30 © 2004 Metro Pulse