SOURCE: “Yo, Kay,” in New York, Vol. 23, No. 44, November 12, 1990, pp. 92-3.

In the following review, Simon offers a negative assessment of Abundance.

As one watches with trepidation the talented Beth Henley making a fool of herself in Abundance, one tries to figure out what could have led the worthy author of Crimes of the Heart to this malfeasance of the mind. Such a crime against one's reputation (even lesser plays by Miss Henley used to show a passel of offbeat felicities) invites critical detective work.

Knowing only what I read in the papers about Miss Henley's private life, I can nevertheless speculate that Abundance is somehow the playwright's own story projected onto a mythic plane, or, more precisely, the Great Plains of the once wild and fabled West. This, then, would be a final, cathartic reckoning with an ex-husband and a female friend, a story of friendship, marriage...