Crimes of the Heart

Last Thursday Mer and I met up for a very filling meal at Texas Roadhouse with Dubbs and her husband Nate. We had a very good time – Dubbs and Nate are fun to be around. Mer and I then went to Actors’ Summit to see their latest production, Crimes of the Heart. I knew nothing at all about the play, and Mer knew almost nothing, except it was a Pulitzer-Prize-winning play by the author who also wrote Miss Firecracker.

The play takes place entirely in the kitchen of one of the main characters. It focuses on three sisters – one who is shy and fairly meek, one who was labeled as a loose woman (and feels she can never love anyone), and one who recently shot her husband in the stomach and is out on bail. Add to all of this that the play takes place in the South, and you have a setting that would make Faulkner proud. I’m not sure why plays and literature that focus on screwed-up or odd people become even more screwed up or odd when they take place in the South, but that does seem to be the case. There is a long history of good screwed-up literature coming from the South for the last one hundred years (Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O’Connor, and more).

Anyway, the play explores the relationships of the sisters to each other and to themselves. As usual, Actors’ Summit staged a good production. The sisters were all very well cast. If there was a slight negative (and it was just slight), the consistency of the southern accents varied from sister to sister. Each woman playing the role was consistent to herself (if she had a strong accent, she kept it up through the play), but one sister had no accent at all, which was a small bit distracting since the other two did have them. Otherwise, they had very strong performances.

The set was excellent – one of the best I have seen at Actors’ Summit. It was an entire kitchen on stage, including full cabinets from the correct period (1970). It turns out that the director had all the cabinets in his basement for storage, and for this play, he just got them out and put them on stage. It was very convincing.

I found the play itself only average. I think I have a hard time relating to plays that focus tightly on women since I am not one. Also, above that, I’ve never shot someone, so that character is hard to relate to. In general, the personality of each woman was exaggerated (which I think is pretty typical of Southern style), so it was excellent at showcasing each personality, but made it very hard to relate to any of the women. There is very little plot development or action in this play, so the play has to be carried by the characters. Since I found it hard to relate to them, the play missed its mark with me. I still had a good time, but I did not leave the theater thinking too hard about the play (except as to try to figure out why I had a bland reaction to it).

On the way home, Mer pointed out some of the cool and more subtle literary things going on (about how each woman slowly faces her inner problems), and that helped some. But I’m pretty sure I would be quite content if I only ever get to see the play just this one time.

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