UMD Intro to Theatre Reviews

Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart is a Southern story, in tone as much as in setting and plot. That is to say its depth and complexity are conveyed in an understated, unhurried way.

The production that opened Thursday at the University of Minnesota Duluth’s Marshall Performing Arts Center captures that essence of the play, even if it foregoes many opportunities to evoke laughter.

Director Bill Payne has concentrated on bringing out the individual characters and the dynamics of their relationships, neither suppressing nor reaching for the script’s humor.

Crimes is the story of the Magrath sisters, Lenny (Kayla Cooper), Meg (Jenna Kase) and Babe (Kathy Tingum), living in Hazelhurst, Miss., in the early 1970s and having a very bad few days. At the opening, it’s spinsterish Lenny’s 30th birthday, and not only has her horse been killed by lightning, but Babe has been arrested for shooting her husband, a state senator, necessitating Lenny summoning Meg home from Los Angeles, where her singing career has hit a brick wall.

Peripheral characters include cousin Chick, a drawling harridan who delights in berating the sisters for this latest blot on the family name, still soiled by their mother having hanged first her cat, then herself, in the basement some years before. Gina Brown not only is deliciously hateful in the role, but she commands the most consistent and authentic Southern accent in the cast.

Dan Beckmann portrays Babe’s lawyer with a very credible intensity to his desire to defend Babe by ruining her husband, his revenge for a wrong the husband did to his father.

The three principals are well-cast. Cooper strikes just the right balance between the stolid, responsible eldest and the quietly loopy: She has a thing about blowing out birthday candles, and before her sisters arrive conducts a private ceremony, sticking a candle into a cookie, lighting it, singing “Happy birthday to me” and blowing it out.

Blonde, leggy Kase is completely believable as Meg, the “most popular” (Babe’s term) or “easiest” (Chick’s) girl back in high school, still pretty much totally — but not unsympathetically — self-absorbed but hiding her own dark secret.

And baby-faced Tingum is the perfect Babe, depicting a naiveté that clashes so dramatically with not only the character’s most recent act but also a sordid past that only is revealed as the story progresses.

The sisters’ travails are not the stuff of thrilling theater, nor even the pinnacle of Southern drama (see A Streetcar Named Desire), but their shared joys and sorrows, bonding and bickering are an exceptional dramatic examination of character, which is perhaps what the Pulitzer Prize committee was lauding when it awarded Crimes its 1978 drama prize.