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Crimes of the Heart by Beth Henley.
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lesson plans and more. See below for details on what is included.
In the following conversation, Henley discusses her development as a playwright and her views of her craft.
This interview was conducted about a month before Beth won the Pulitzer Prize for her play, ...
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The following article includes a favorable assessment of Crimes of the Heart, as well as comments on the play by Henley and others.
Beth Henley can go home again, but it isn't easy. "I&#...
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Kerr notes that disbelief was his prevailing response to Crimes of the Heart, maintaining that Henley pushes the play's improbabilities into the realm of jokes.
Beth Henley's Crimes of t...
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Below, Simon evaluates the Broadway production of Crimes of the Heart, declaring that "this is one of those rare plays about a family love that you can believe and participate in. "
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Brustein offers a lukewarm evaluation of Crimes of the Heart, maintaining that while the play is whimsical and likable, it is "unlikely to survive as anything more than a stock company favorite...
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In the excerpt below, Demastes explores the manner in which Henley "has taken domestic comedy and infused it with an absurdist perspective " in Crimes of the Heart.
Winning the 1981 Puli...
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In the following essay, Haedicke compares the depiction of domestic violence in Shepard's A Lie of the Mind and Henley's Crimes of the Heart, asserting that Shepard's postmodernis...
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In the following essay, Rosefeldt links Henley's Crimes of the Heart to the Chekhovian tradition, in particular to the drama The Three Sisters.
Another play that focuses on the daughter'...
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In the following review of the published play, Parisi offers a laudatory assessment of Crimes of the Heart.
No wonder this play [Crimes of the Heart] won the Pulitzer—it has just about everythi...
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Critical Essay by Terry Curtis Fox
[Crimes of the Heart] is a very insubstantial piece of work, an almost mechanical comedy which would be perfectly in place in NormanLearLand. It is also very special...
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Critical Essay by Stanley Kauffmann
The success of [Crimes of the Heart] is, to some extent, a victory over this production. Henley is a Mississippian who writes about small-town life in her home stat...
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Critical Essay by Edith Oliver
["Crimes of the Heart"] is a comedy of private disasters among three sisters in Hazlehurst, Mississippi…. The sisters—walking wounded, who ar...
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Critical Essay by Scot Haller
Henley's [Crimes of the Heart] has elicited comparisons with the works of such distinguished Southern writers as Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor, in part...
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Critical Essay by Don Nelsen
["Crimes of the Heart"] is overlong, occasionally cliched and annoyingly frivolous at moments, but Henley keeps intriguing us with a delightfully wacky humor...
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Critical Essay by Walter Kerr
["Crimes of the Heart"] is loaded and perhaps overloaded with quirky, casually outrageous, Mississippi-Gothic misbehavior. As I watched the three MaGrath si...
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Critical Essay by John Simon
[Crimes of the Heart] could have been written as drama, farce, absurdist comedy, or that particularly southern genre, the winsome horror story. It does indeed partake a li...
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Critical Essay by Brendan Gill
Though ["Crimes of the Heart"] is Miss Henley's first play, it has a daffy complexity of plot that old pros like Kaufman and Hart would have envied,...
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Critical Essay by Michael Feingold
Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart has, to my surprise, sickened me instead of boring me. I had expected a piece of southern-fried kitsch that would tickle and...
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Critical Essay by Leo Sauvage
The critics' virtually unanimous decision has been confirmed at the box office: Crimes of the Heart is the first comedy hit of the 1981–'82 season. N...
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Teaching Crimes of the Heart
All teaching products sold separately.
Crimes of the Heart Lesson Plans contain 120 pages of teaching material, including:
Interview by Beth Henley with John Griffin Jones
