Play: Crimes of the Heart

Overview

Beth Henley’s 1979 play Crimes of the Heart is a darkly comic portrait of three sisters in small-town Mississippi whose missteps, longings, and loyalties collide over a few fraught days. Winner of the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, the play mixes Southern Gothic shadows with buoyant humor, revealing how private wounds and public scandals tangle in a family that has learned to survive through story, song, and sheer stubborn spirit.

Setting and Premise

The action unfolds entirely in the worn kitchen of the Magrath family home in Hazlehurst, Mississippi. The sisters’ mother’s notorious suicide, she hanged herself and the family cat, haunts the house like a legend the town never lets them forget. It is Lenny’s thirtieth birthday when the play begins. At the same time, her youngest sister, Babe, has just been arrested for shooting her powerful husband, Zachary Botrelle, a prominent local attorney. Their glamorous middle sister, Meg, returns home from a faltering singing career on the West Coast, called back by crisis and the chance to remake old choices.

Plot Summary

Lenny fusses over a lonely birthday morning when Cousin Chick, a busybody steeped in small-town propriety, sweeps in with gossip and scorn. Babe, released on bail, is confused and blithe; her explanation for the shooting shifts between shock and the dawning admission of long-term abuse. Meg arrives with brash charm, deflecting worry about a recent breakdown and the collapse of her musical ambitions. The sisters’ grandfather, who raised them, lies gravely ill in the hospital, another weight on Lenny, the designated caretaker.

The play’s present-tense crisis blooms as details surface: Babe has been having an affair with Willie Jay, a Black teenager, a fact that Zachary uses to threaten and control her. Barnette Lloyd, a young lawyer with a personal vendetta against Zachary, takes Babe’s case, pledging to neutralize incriminating photographs and argue self-defense. Meg reconnects with Doc Porter, the childhood sweetheart who was injured in Hurricane Camille years earlier after staying with her; he now walks with a limp and has a family, and their reunion stirs tenderness shadowed by old guilt. Lenny, convinced her “shrunken ovary” makes her unlovable, hides from a shy suitor, Charlie, until Meg pushes her to risk hope.

The second act crests with humiliations and near-tragedy: Chick’s attacks escalate, Meg’s lies about her career unravel, and Babe, terrified Zachary will ruin Willie Jay’s life, attempts suicide in a comic-absurd, heartbreaking scene that ends with rescue rather than death. In the final movement, Barnette undercuts Zachary’s leverage, Meg stops romanticizing escape, and Lenny asserts herself, sending Chick packing and calling Charlie. The sisters greet dawn with a shared slice of birthday cake, a fragile but genuine moment of joy that signals their choice to live, together, with the truth.

Themes and Tone

Henley threads domestic farce through trauma, asking what counts as a crime when the heart’s needs collide with law and custom. Sisterhood becomes both battleground and sanctuary, a language of teasing, music, and kitchen rituals that keeps despair at bay. The play probes the legacies of shame, mental illness, sexuality, class, and race, in a conservative community, while honoring the stubborn resilience that lets people reframe their pasts without denying them. Humor is not an escape hatch but a survival tool that recasts grief into something speakable.

Structure and Style

A three-act, single-set comedy-drama, the play relies on quicksilver dialogue, prop-driven gags, and abrupt emotional pivots. Henley’s Southern idiom is affectionate but unsentimental, allowing moments of slapstick to land beside confessional monologues without tonal whiplash. Offstage forces, the hospital, the courthouse, the hurricane’s memory, press inward, but the kitchen remains the crucible where private choices take public shape.

Legacy

After its 1979 premiere, Crimes of the Heart moved to New York, earning the 1981 Pulitzer and becoming a staple of American repertory theaters. A 1986 film adaptation widened its audience, but the play’s lasting power lies in its rich roles for women and its deft balance of hilarity and hurt, which continues to invite fresh, compassionate stagings.