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[THEATER REVIEW] CRIMES OF THE HEART at WTF
8.12.07
Crimes of the Heart
(Nikos Theater, Williamstown, Mass.; 172 seats; $35 top)
By CHRIS NEWBOUND/Variety Magazine
A Williamstown Theater Festival presentation of a play in two acts by Beth Henley. Directed by Kathleen Turner.
Lenny Magrath - Jennifer Dundas
Chick Boyle - Kali Rocha
Doc Porter - Patch Darragh
Meg Magrath - Sarah Paulson
Babe Botrelle - Lily Rabe
Barnette Lloyd - Chandler Williams
On the face of it, Kathleen Turner could not have chosen better material to make her directorial debut than Beth Henley's 1981 Pulitzer-winning a play about the reunion of three Southern sisters.
It's your prototypical family dramedy and it's a lot less daunting than taking on, say, "A Long Day's Journey Into Night." "Crimes of the Heart" is a solid, albeit safe choice for Turner, and her cast in the Williamstown Theater Festival production is on key, with hardly a false note throughout.
But perhaps that's selling the actress-turned-director a little short. This is a more difficult play to pull off than it might appear. Those who have seen it before (even in Bruce Beresford's 1986 film version with Diane Keaton, Jessica Lange and Sissy Spacek), may remember it as a crowd-pleaser. At times, in fact, it tries so hard to be likeable it can feel a little cloying. But the real challenge with this work is how little actually happens in it. Both the long-ago suicide of the sisters' mother and the recent shooting of her husband by youngest sibling Babe (played flawlessly and tenderly by Lily Rabe) have occurred before the play has even begun.
Henley says she loosely based her first full-length work on Chekhov's "Three Sisters," and while there are certainly more laughs here, both rely upon the accumulation of small moments, most of which are realized by Turner and company.
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