A new side to the South

There aren’t many happy stories about the South.
They’re all dark and brooding, about murky family secrets and slow deaths, suffocating honor and tradition. And if there’s love, it’s always the wrong kind of love.

That’s why the fleeting happy moments in “Crimes of the Heart” are so compelling.
Black humor bubbles to the surface of Beth Henley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play. Lee Kitts’ direction is deft enough to laugh at evil and teeter between light and dark.

The narrative is driven by three sisters’ intersection of space and time in the kitchen of their childhood home of Hazlehurst, Miss., during Fall 1974, within the space of 24 hours.

We are immediately introduced to the eldest sister’s (Tara Brinduse) life of solitude and loneliness. That is quickly interrupted by the return home of the wild, middle child (Anne Roser), due to the youngest sister’s (Clara Boiling) shooting of her husband under mysterious circumstances, interrupting her sister’s quiet life.

But this is the South. So they each have their personal demons and unspoken familial histories that unwind as the play progresses, albeit slowly. The play is long, and it felt like it was going to end two or three different times near the end of its three-hour run.
The pacing becomes more comfortable toward the middle of the piece, and a third act is endurable with the prospect of more scenes where the three sisters are united.

Acting-wise, there is no weak link in this show. Even the smaller parts played by the men of the cast (Richard Boehler and Chris Chavez) are executed with dandy, southern poise. The stellar stage presence of Stephanie Grilo, playing the sisters’ cousin, is unmistakable as she represents the jeering eyes and quiet judgments of the outside world to the quiet island reality that is the Magrath sisters’ kitchen.
The dialogue of the play is always engrossing, but when the sisters are together, they brood and bicker and splinter as people. In brief moments, we see love, and not the dark, lonely love we see in the play most the time, but a love acting as an asylum of vulnerability to those within it.

It’s powerful.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of important non-characters, characters who are discussed in length but never actually appear: the youngest sister’s late husband, the sisters’ absent father, the mother who committed suicide, the deceased grandmother, the main maternal figure of their lives, and the sickly grandfather, hospitalized and dying.

The events are a microcosm of dramatic action at the peak of so many lives we have the liberty to witness, while with others we have missed that chance, and we see only those left behind.

“Crimes of the Heart” walks a fine existential line of despair and hope, and it is easy to find humor and identify in its humanity.