THE THEATER: BETH HENLEY'S 'CRIMES OF THE HEART'
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By FRANK RICH
Published: November 5, 1981, Thursday
BETH HENLEY'S ''Crimes of the Heart'' ends with its three heroines - the MaGrath sisters of Hazelhurst, Miss. -helping themselves to brick-sized hunks of a chocolate birthday cake. The cake, a ''super deluxe'' extravaganza from the local bakery, is as big as the kitchen table, and the sisters laugh their heads off as they dig in. The scene is the perfect capper for an evening of antic laughter - yet it's by no means the sum of ''Crimes of the Heart.'' While this play overflows with infectious high spirits, it is also, unmistakably, the tale of a very troubled family. Such is Miss Henley's prodigious talent that she can serve us pain as though it were a piece of cake.
Prodigious, to say the least. This is Miss Henley's first play. Originally produced at Louisville's Actors Theater, it won the Pulitzer Prize and New York Drama Critics Circle Award after its New York production last winter at the Manhattan Theater Club. Last night that production arrived, springier than ever, at the Golden, and it's not likely to stray from Broadway soon. Melvin Bernhardt, the director, has fulfilled Miss Henley's comedy by casting young actors whose future looks every bit as exciting as the playwright's.
''Crimes'' is set ''five years after Hurricane Camille'' in the MaGrath family kitchen, a sunny garden of linoleum and translucent, flowered wallpaper designed by John Lee Beatty. The action unfolds during what the youngest sister, 24-year-old Babe (Mia Dillon), calls ''a bad day.'' Babe knows whereof she speaks: She's out on bail, having just shot her husband in the stomach. And Babe's not the only one with problems. Her 27-year-old sister Meg (Mary Beth Hurt), a would-be singing star, has retreated from Hollywood by way of a psychiatric ward. Lenny (Lizbeth Mackay), the eldest MaGrath, is facing her 30th birthday with a ''shrunken ovary'' and no romantic prospects. As if this weren't enough, Old Granddaddy, the family patriarch, is in the hospital with ''blood vessels popping in his brain.''
A comedy, you ask? Most certainly - and let's not forget about the local lady with the ''tumor on her bladder,'' about the neighbor with the ''crushed leg,'' about the sudden death by lightning of Lenny's pet horse, Billy Boy. Miss Henley redeems these sorrows, and more, by mining a pure vein of Southern Gothic humor worthy of Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. The playwright gets her laughs not because she tells sick jokes, but because she refuses to tell jokes at all. Her characters always stick to the unvarnished truth, at any price, never holding back a single gory detail. And the truth - when captured like lightning in a bottle - is far funnier than any invented wisecracks.
Why did Babe shoot her husband? Because, she says, ''I didn't like his looks.'' Why, after firing the gun, did she make a pitcher of lemonade before calling an ambulance? Because she was thirsty. Why did she carry on with a 15-year-old black boy during the months before her crime? ''I was so lonely,'' explains Miss Dillon, ''and he was goooood.'' Why has Babe's lawyer, a young, sheepish Ole Miss grad (Peter MacNicol), taken on such a seemingly hopeless case? Because Babe won his heart when she sold him poundcake at a long-ago church bazaar - and because he believes in ''personal vendettas.''
You see Miss Henley's technique. She builds from a foundation of wacky but consistent logic until she's constructed a funhouse of perfect-pitch language and ever-accelerating misfortune. By Act III, we're so at home in the crazy geography of the MaGraths' lives that we're laughing at the slightest prick of blood. At that point Miss Henley starts kindling comic eruptions on the most unlikely lines - ''Old Granddaddy's in a coma!'' - without even trying. That's what can happen when a playwright creates a world and lets the audience inhabit it.
We're not laughing at the characters, of course, but with them. We all have bad days, when we contemplate - or are victims of - irrational crimes of the heart. In this play, Miss Henley shows how comedy at its best can heighten reality to illuminate the landscape of existence in all its mean absurdity. But the heightening is not achieved at the price of credibility. The MaGraths come by their suffering naturally: It's been their legacy since childhood, when their father vanished and their mother hanged herself -and her pet cat - in the cellar. ''Crimes of the Heart'' is finally the story of how its young characters escape the past to seize the future. ''We've got to figure out a way to get through these bad days here,'' says Meg. That can't happen for any of us until the corpses of a childhood are truly laid to rest.
Like the compassionate author, the director makes us care deeply about the MaGraths, crimes and all. Mr. Bernhardt is completely in touch with the play's strong family feelings; he turns a funhouse into a love-suffused, sisterly home that fills the Broadway vacuum left by the departure of ''Morning's at Seven.'' Though he can't quite whip the evening's slight overlength and the routine writing of the two secondary characters, you'll probably be too busy enjoying the four principal players to care.
It's great fun to watch Miss Mackay's spinsterish Lenny blossom from a moody, self-pitying fussbudget into a self-possessed woman; the actress walks a tremulous line between hilarity and hysteria as she goes. As Meg, the loose, selfish sister who blossomed too early, Miss Hurt proves she's a powerfully sexy comedienne as well as a good actress. A battle-scarred, rueful adult, she also lets us see the golden, headstrong teen-age girl who once liked to shock her peers by mocking the March of Dimes posters at Dixieland Drugs.
Miss Dillon and Mr. MacNicol are priceless as the accused Babe and her green lawyer. Perhaps the baby-faced Mr. MacNicol is so because his awkward little boy's demeanor - slow molasses voice, misbuttoned suit and toothy, open-mouthed grin - is in such ridiculous contrast to the no-nonsense professional manner he adopts to impress his client. Perhaps Miss Dillon - speaking in an excitable girlish yelp - delights us because she's guileless when contemplating murder yet naughty on the subject of birthday cakes. But why try to pin them down? Just be grateful that we have a new writer from hurricane country who gives her characters room to spin and spin and spin. Unvarnished Laughs CRIMES OF THE HEART, by Beth Henley; di- rected by Melvin Bernhardt; sets by John Lee Beatty; costumes by Patricia McGourty; lighting by Dennis Parichy. Presented by Warner Theater Productions Inc., Claire Nichtern, Mary Lea Johnson, Martin Richards and Francine Le-Frak. At the John Golden Theater, 252 West 45th Street. Lenny MaGrath ..........................
Lizbeth Mackay Chick Boyle ............................Sharon Ullrick Doc Porter ..............................Raymond Baker Meg MaGrath ............................Mary Beth Hurt Babe Botrelle ..............................Mia Dillon Barnette Lloyd .........................Peter MacNicol
