Crimes of the Heart

Roundabout / Laura Pels Theater

Feb 6, 2008

VanLoan

vanloan@nyconstage.org

Look out; those zany McGrath sisters are back in town! Crimes of the Heart, Beth Henley's Pulitzer Prize winning tragi-comedy has returned to the Roundabout with all its Southern fried charms. But despite three high profile stage actresses and a movie star director (Kathleen Turner), the play is beginning to look a little threadbare (it doesn't help that the 2econd Stage's 2001 revival is still in one's memory).

Henley's quirky mix of Anton Chekhov and Flannery O'Connor seemed effervescent in 1981 (unfortunately nothing Ms. Henley has written since has come up to this level). Today, the antics of the three McGrath sisters seem a little cloying.

Loosely modeled after Chekhov's The Three Sisters, the story of the McGrath's of Hazelhurst, Mississippi takes place in 1974 (five years after hurricane Camille). It's the 30th Birthday of Lenny McGrath (Jennifer Dundas) who suffers from no marital prospects and a shrunken ovary. Babe (Lily Rabe) has just shot her husband because "she didn't like the way he looked". Meg (Sarah Paulson) is returning home from California and a failed career as an actress/singer. Hovering over the household is the ghost of Momma McGrath who committed suicide by hanging herself and her cat. The sisters bicker, make-up, gossip, harass their next door cousin Chick (a brassy Jessica Stone) and deal with the current men folk in their lives, notably Babe's lawyer Barnette Lloyd (Chandler Williams) and Meg's old flame Doc Porter (Patch Darragh).

Laid out on Anna Louizos functional lived-in set, the most distinguishing characteristic in this revival is the hard edged no nonsense direction of Ms. Turner. While never sacrificing any of the humor in the script, Turner consistently emphasizes the ominous sense of fatality that underlies Henley's skewed sensibility. Thus by highlighting the more Gothic aspects of the script, she is able to get tougher, leaner performances from her actresses. Paulson's Meg is a little more astringent; Rabe's Babe is a bit more of a sociopath and best of all Dundas's Lennie comes off a little more frantic and trapped.

Even the men who once seemed little more than caricatures now hold their own against the women. William's Lloyd is humorously moving in his fawning over Rabe's ditzy murderess and Darragh is equally touching in his anxiety to regain Meg's attentions. By turning the prism of the McGrath household ever so slightly, Turner shifts the tone from comic melodrama to one of quiet desperation.

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