Crimes of the Heart is a comedy in the way Chekhov’s self-described comedies are. Indeed, Barba Redmond in her director’s notes has reasonably compared it and its leads to his Three Sisters.Each play is really site-specific, Henley’s in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, with a quirky fall atmosphere like the dropping leaves outside the three Magrath Sisters’ house.
In the kitchen, with the appliances, maple furniture, and decor certainly lower middle class and 1974, Lenny (a peaked but hopeful-looking Maxey Whitehead) tries to light a candle on a cookie to mark her 30th birthday. It may be her only enjoyment this day in her uncelebrated life of taking on unwanted family responsibilities and spinsterhood.
Sister Babe (Lucy Lavely, acting eccentric, even petulant, yet genuine) has been bailed out of jail for shooting her lawyer husband. Their cousin Chick (Georgia Mallory Guy, rightly sharp-edged but normal) appears in charge, while she gloats over the sisters’ misfortunes, pointing out social problems she’s had to endure as their relative. It’s not the best time to appear for Meg (effervescent Kelly Campbell), who abruptly left her love, Doc (Christopher Swan, earnest and sweet) for a singing career out West. Having had an often hard-knock life, recently mysterious, Meg tries not to show it as she makes a stage entrance and attempts to continue as a star. Will she divert from the others’ problems and also prove still first in the affections of Doc, now a husband and father?
All the sisters’ attitudes are tied to their mother’s suicide and their acts to a search for true love. Babe, the most affected, has committed the most obvious of the titular crimes, and that’s not her only transgression. What about the other women’s and how are theirs “of the heart”? Henley isn’t clear on these points. Maybe the crimes and the hearts don’t belong to all three sisters but to other characters, on and off stage.
A person outside the family whose heart is affected by Babe’s actions is Barnette Lloyd. Jesse Dorman, as a lawyer pursuing a vendetta against Babe’s husband, seems not so much to pick up some of her eccentricities as he does to unite his lesser ones with hers. Are they going to unite in any other way?
Like a Chekovian comedy, then, Henley’s presents a defining moment in her interesting characters’ lives. So it’s apt that the play begins and ends with a birthday celebration, as does the production with country music with lyrics that match the play’s dialogue in tone.
