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    A Study Guide for Beth Henley's "Crimes of the Heart"
    A Study Guide for Beth Henley's "Crimes of the Heart"
    A Study Guide for Beth Henley's "Crimes of the Heart"
    Ebook50 pages1 hour

    A Study Guide for Beth Henley's "Crimes of the Heart"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Beth Henley's "Crimes of the Heart," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535821292
    A Study Guide for Beth Henley's "Crimes of the Heart"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Beth Henley's "Crimes of the Heart" - Gale

      3

      Crimes of the Heart

      Beth Henley

      1979

      Introduction

      Beth Henley completed Crimes of the Heart, her tragic comedy about three sisters surviving crisis after crisis in a small Mississippi town, in 1978. She submitted it to several regional theatres for consideration without success. Unknown to her, however, a friend had entered it in the well-known Great American Play Contest of the Actors’ Theatre of Louisville. The play was chosen as co-winner for 1977-78 and performed in February, 1979, at the company’s annual festival of New American Plays. The production was extremely well-received, and the play was picked up by numerous regional theatres for their 1979-81 seasons.

      At the end of 1980, Crimes of the Heart was produced off-Broadway at the Manhattan Theatre Club for a limited, sold-out, engagement of thirty-two performances. By the time the play transferred to Broadway in November, 1981, Crimes of the Heart had received the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. Henley was the first woman to win the Pulitzer for Drama in twenty-three years, and her play was the first ever to win before opening on Broadway. Crimes of the Heart went on to garner the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best New American Play, a Gugenheim Award, and a Tony nomination. The tremendously successful Broadway production ran for 535 performances, spawning regional productions in London, Chicago, Washington, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Houston. The success of the play—and especially the prestige of the Pulitzer award—assured Henley’s place among the elite of the American theatre for years to come. As Henley herself put it, with typically wry humor, winning the Pulitzer Prize means I’ll never have to work in a dog-food factory again (Haller 44).

      Often compared to the work of other Southern Gothic writers like Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor, Henley’s play is widely appreciated for its compassionate look at good country people whose lives have gone wrong. Henley explores the pain of life by piling up tragedies on her characters in a manner some critics have found excessive, but she does so with a dark and penetrating sense of humor which audiences—as the play’s success has demonstrated—found to be a fresh perspective in the American theatre.

      Author Biography

      Beth Henley was born May 8, 1952, in Jackson, Mississippi, the daughter of an attorney and a community theatre actress. Her southern heritage has played a large role in the setting and themes of her writing, as well as the critical response she has received—she is often categorized as a writer of the Southern Gothic tradition. As an undergraduate at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, Texas, Henley studied acting and this training has remained important to her since her transition to play writing. Directors and fellow playwrights have observed that Henley approaches a play from the point of view of theater, not literature and that as an actress, she then knows how to make her works stageworthy (Haller).

      She wrote her first play, a one-act titled Am I Blue, to fulfill a play writing class assignment. When it was produced at SMU her senior year, she modestly used the pseudonym Amy Peach. The play

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