THEATER REVIEW; Granddaddy Is in a Coma, And That's the Good News
By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: April 17, 2001, Tuesday
Angst comes in shades of pink in the perky new revival of ''Crimes of the Heart,'' Beth Henley's Pultizer Prize-winning comedy about the sorrows and strengths of Southern sisterhood.
Pink is the color of the tissues that a character uses to mop her eyes and nose as she sobs over mortal thoughts on her 30th birthday. Pink (leaning toward fuchsia) is the color of the rope with which another young woman tries to hang herself.
Pink, for that matter, is often the color of Ms. Henley's prose, which somehow always finds the sugar in the shadows of despair. This probably was not what Édith Piaf meant when she sang about la vie en rose. Still, there's something in the pain beneath the pastels that Piaf might have appreciated.
It's been two decades since ''Crimes of the Heart'' wowed the critics and skipped blithely from the Manhattan Theater Club to Broadway, turning Ms. Henley into the playwright of the moment. Here, it seemed, was a feminine answer to the dysfunctional family dramas of Sam Shepard: a girl's guide to American Gothic, as opposed to Mr. Shepard's head-tripping, brawling boy's-eye views.
Theatergoers who were then seduced by Ms. Henley's sticky brand of whimsy may feel a little sheepish sitting through the enthusiastic production of ''Crimes'' that opened last night at the Second Stage Theater. Under the direction of Garry Hynes, the show scales up the preciousness of this story of three Mississippi sisters in emotional meltdown.
Certainly there are stretches when the cuteness of it all gets to you, when the experience starts to feel like listening to ''I Enjoy Being a Girl'' played in a minor key on a country church organ. This is, after all, a production in which an overgrown nymphet, fresh out of jail, curls up on a cot with her pet saxophone, suggesting Tennessee Williams's ''Baby Doll'' as a musical comedy.
Yet there are also moments when ''Crimes'' still rings true enough to draw that dark, heart-deep laughter that might turn into tears any second. There is, for example, the scene where the play's fractious sisters dissolve into a harmony of giggles over the news that their grandfather has fallen into a coma. Surely you've been there, to that point where life has sprung so many horrors that you're punch drunk.
Such grotesqueries are plentiful in ''Crimes,'' and they don't benefit from magnification. (That was clear in the 1986 film version starring Diane Keaton, Jessica Lange and Sissy Spacek.) The play, you may recall, includes tales of a mother who hanged herself and the family cat, a beloved old horse struck by lightning and a childlike wife who mixes herself a pitcher of lemonade after shooting her husband in the stomach.
Ms. Hynes is the Irish director who brought a welcome matter-of-factness to (and won a Tony for) her staging of another play about fatal family eccentricities, Martin McDonagh's ''Beauty Queen of Leenane.'' Yet here she goes for exaggeration, sometimes to the point of slapstick, when a throwaway attitude would be far more effective.
As it is, the evening is alternately moving and cloying. The same might be said of all but three of the four major performances, though it's a pleasure to find so many talented young actresses on a single stage. And one couldn't ask for a more socially eloquent backdrop for them than Thomas Lynch's fraying kitchen set.
Playing the Magrath sisters are Enid Graham as Lenny, the premature spinster with ''a deformed ovary''; Amy Ryan as Meg, the promiscuous one who comes home from a thwarted career as a singer (and a nervous breakdown) in Los Angeles, and Mary Catherine Garrison as Babe, the husband-shooter who is out on bail. Julia Murney is the bossy Chick, their status-quo-worshiping cousin.
Ms. Garrison's vanilla-ice-cream Babe is the evening's attention getter. Her timing is inspired as she wearily takes account of a future that may include prison, and she brings a fine air of abstraction to Babe's account of her crime to an adoring young lawyer (Jason Butler Harner). She also delivers machine-gun volleys of ''ooohs,'' to evoke anger and frustration, that belong more properly to Southern sitcoms like ''Designing Women.''
Enid Graham, the appealingly intense actress from ''Honour'' on Broadway, also runs the danger of suffocating her inhibited character in big idiosyncrasies. Ms. Murney has no choice but to play the grating Chick as a target for audience hatred, but she nevertheless brings a dead-on pious relish to descriptions of scandals and illnesses.
It is Ms. Ryan, though, who gives the evening its center of credibility. An inappropriately fierce Sonya in last season's ''Uncle Vanya,'' she here lets you glimpse the anxiety beneath Meg's defensive toughness without wallowing in it. And every reaction, no matter how extravagant, seems grounded in a firm emotional logic.
She also listens with an intent focus that suggests intriguing undercurrents in what the others are saying. Everyone else, including Talmadge Lowe as Meg's former lover, benefits from sharing the stage with her.
It is Meg who, after her sister's aborted suicide attempt, speaks the play's simple watchwords: ''We've just got to learn how to get through these real bad days here.'' Such understatement in the face of absurdity cuts right through the clouds of feyness. When this production maintains a similarly straight face, the tickling sadness that first made ''Crimes'' a hit shines anew.
CRIMES OF THE HEART
By Beth Henley; directed by Garry Hynes; sets by Thomas Lynch; costumes by Susan Hilferty; lighting by Rui Rita; original music and sound by Donald DiNicola; dialects, Deborah Hecht; production stage manager, Kelley Kirkpatrick; stage manager, Amy Patricia Stern. Associate artistic director, Christopher Burney; general manager, C. Barrack Evans; production manager, Peter J. Davis. Presented by Second Stage Theater, Carole Rothman, artistic director; Mark Linn-Baker, 2001 season artistic director; Carol Fishman, managing director; Alexander Fraser, executive director. At 307 West 43rd Street, Clinton.
WITH: Julia Murney (Chick), Enid Graham (Lenny), Talmadge Lowe (Doc), Amy Ryan (Meg), Mary Catherine Garrison (Babe) and Jason Butler Harner (Barnett).
