Crimes of the Heart.

by Beth Henley

Paperback, 1998

Status

Available

Genres

All Topics

Fiction

Publication

Dramatists Play Service, Inc. (1998), 72 pages

Description

Drama. Fiction. Literature. HTML: This Pulitzer Prize-winner is a deeply touching and funny play about three eccentric sisters from a small Southern town rocked by scandal when Babe, the youngest, shoots her husband. Humor and pathos abound as the sisters unite with an intense young lawyer to save Babe from a murder charge, and overcome their family's painful past. A BBC co-production. A full-cast production featuring: Ray Baker, Donna Bullock, Arye Gross, Glenne Headly, Sondra Locke and Belita Moreno..

User reviews

LibraryThing member opinion8dsngr

When Babe manages to rather mysteriously shoot her Senator husband, the women of her family surround each other in an attempt to weather out the fall-out. This play is more of a character study than a plot-intensive peice of drama. It does manage to cover some very serious issues: suicide,

justifyable violence, etc. in a humorous and well-put-together background. Still, I think it must have been a sparce year in 1972 for this to have won the Pulitzer. It's a good play, but nothing monumental.

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LibraryThing member Devil_llama

A southern family faces a crisis when one of the sisters shoots her husband. This happens before the play begins; the bulk of the play is less about the shooting than about the relationships between the three girls, with a couple of other factors thrown in for complexity. Difficult to find too many

people in this group to like, or to feel sympathy with, but there is still the ability to engage as you watch people losing all touch with reality and moving toward destruction. The ending is ambiguous and unresolved; that is not a complaint, as I often find that compelling in a dramatic work. It's hard to see this as a masterpiece, but it is definitely past competent, with the various threads skillfully woven, though a few stitches are dropped in the weaving.

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LibraryThing member DanielSTJ

A fairly straightforward play. I'm not quite sure how this won the Pulitzer Prize, as I did not really witness anything extraordinary or amazing. Overall, the characters felt somewhat real but they also suffered from, in my opinion, a bit of overacting and overbearing in regards to the reader.

3

stars.

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LibraryThing member leslie.98

Perhaps I would have liked this play a bit more if I had seen it on the stage. The craziness of these 3 sisters from Mississippi felt a little tired to me, a bit too stereotypical, while the problems they were facing were in some cases so serious that the characters' attitudes struck me as

incredible - something aped from the late 19th century or from the old TV show "Designing Women" instead of from real life.

Listened to this play via streaming courtesy of LATW website

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