Beth Henley - Career

Career

Crimes of the Heart was Henley's first professionally produced play. It opened at the Actors Theatre of Louisville in 1978, where it was declared co-winner of a new American play contest. The play then moved to New York and was produced by the Manhattan Theatre Club. Crimes of the Heart won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1981, as well as the award for Best American Play of 1981 from the New York Drama Critics' Circle. The play also earned Henley a nomination for a Tony Award, and her screenplay for the film version of Crimes of the Heart was nominated for an Oscar as Best Adapted Screenplay. Henley has stated that growing up with 3 sisters was a major inspiration for her play Crimes of the Heart.

Henley's first six plays are set in the Deep South: two in Louisiana and four in Mississippi, where she grew up. Themes of her dramas are tied to small town values and the importance of love. Henley particularly focuses on her female characters in terms of identity and expression. Dominant themes include:

• The value of love with family love providing support more often than romantic love;
• Family ties in the domestic realm and how both this and society values define and confine female characters; and
• Socially constructed desires and their impact on gender identity.

Henley views her characters as examples of the repercussions of modern society and representative of the alienation, pain, and suffering that reflect the human condition. Her plays explore the dichotomy within individuals that seek happiness but are betrayed by modern civilization. Henley's notion that neurotic behavior is endemic to modern civilization stems from Freud's psychoanalytic theory. Her Southern sense of the grotesque and absurd experienced in daily existence have caused some critics to compare Henley to other Southern Writers such as Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. This attitude has caused Henley to be classified in the Southern Gothic genre.

Henley's writing style has evolved throughout her career. Her plays of the 1980s are characterized as naturalistic and dramatize the relationship between the interior self and the exterior world. The characters are outsiders, and by virtue of their nonconformity they risk being unable to share their feelings, insights, and experiences with others because they are alone, punished for their difference. They risk being institutionally isolated in a prison or asylum because they are so alone, so outside behavioral norms, that their actions warrant their removal from society. Hope exists in the search for a kindred soul. Her plays of the 1990s are considered experimental in moving beyond the traditional settings and themes of her earlier work. These plays explore structure and the concepts of time with action occurring in a fragmentary way, spanning amounts of time, and/or occurring in episodic succession. This is clearly seen in Abundance, the first play not set in the South. Henley applies a new technique in these plays: structuring action around a gap and subsequent references which cast doubt on the action of the absent scene. Henley begins to mix genres, such as play noir and integrates repeated verbal and visual images across genres with the theme of love dominating as well as exploring the theme of denial. Henley later attempts to reconcile themes of love and imagination in Revelers and employs ancient theatre techniques, such as a prologue, in the title and structure of the play. A recurring feature in all of her plays, Henley brings together a collection of individuals who cling to the self-images and experiences that give them their identity.