Beth Henley

• Born: May 8, 1952
• Place of Birth: Jackson, Mississippi

Biography

Beth Henley, born Elizabeth Hecker Henley, grew up in Mississippi. The daughter of an actress, Henley yearned to follow her mother’s career. One of four sisters, she attended Murrah High School in Jackson. She then went to Dallas to major in acting at Southern Methodist University (SMU), where she took her B.F.A. in 1974. While in Dallas, Henley began her acting career, performing at Theatre Three. She also acted and taught creative dramatics for children at The Dallas Minority Repertory Theatre.

She wrote her first play, a one-act work titled Am I Blue, while she was a student at SMU; it was produced at the university’s Margo Jones Theatre in 1973. Am I Blue was later staged in 1982 by New York’s Circle Repertory Company as part of a triple bill titled “Confluence.” The play was included in the volume Best Short Plays of 1983. In 1975, Henley moved to Urbana, Illinois, where she taught introductory acting at the University of Illinois and acted at the New Salem State Park theater. In 1976, Henley moved to Los Angeles, where she joined the professional acting company of the Great American People Show. In that same year she began her domestic partnership with actor and director Stephen Tobolowsky, which lasted until 1988.

Henley’s career as a playwright blossomed when in 1978 she won first prize in the Great American Playwriting Contest for Crimes of the Heart, a play she had written while studying at an acting workshop in Burbank, California. In 1979, Crimes of the Heart was produced by the Actors Theatre of Louisville, Kentucky. It won widespread acclaim and was commissioned for a Broadway production. Before the play opened in New York, Henley was awarded the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for drama, making Crimes of the Heart the first play ever to earn a Pulitzer Prize before it opened on Broadway.

Henley’s award was also the first Pulitzer Prize received by a woman playwright in twenty-three years. Crimes of the Heart won the New York Drama Critics Award, and when it opened at New York’s Manhattan Theatre Club in 1980, it was a great critical and commercial success. Frank Rich, the critic for The New York Times, was moved to observe that the play richly deserved the Pulitzer award. It then moved on to Broadway at the Golden Theatre in 1981. A successful London production soon followed. In 1986, Crimes of the Heart was made into a movie starring Sissy Spacek and Sam Shepard. It received three Academy Award nominations, including one for the best screenplay as written by Henley.

Henley’s playwriting continued at a rapid pace, and Crimes of the Heart was followed in 1981 by The Wake of Jamey Foster, which had its world premiere at the Hartford Stage Company in Hartford, Connecticut. It then moved to Broadway’s Eugene O’Neill Theatre in 1982. Although The Wake of Jamie Foster was extremely well received in Hartford, it opened to a very poor critical response in New York and closed after a short run. Henley was not to have another show in New York until the Manhattan Theatre Club produced The Miss Firecracker Contest in 1984, following an earlier production in 1980 at the Victory Theatre in Burbank. The Miss Firecracker Contest was listed in the Ten Best Plays of 1983-1984. In 1989, the work was made into a film for which Henley wrote the screenplay.

Even as Henley was at work on two major films, she continued to create stage plays. In 1987, The Lucky Spot was presented in New York at the Manhattan Theatre Club, followed in 1988, at the same theater by The Debutante Ball, her darkest comedy, considered by many to be her best work. In 1989, The Debutante Ball had its London premiere, and a London production of The Lucky Spot was staged in 1991. Throughout the 1990’s, Henley regularly produced major dramatic works such as Abundance (1990), Signature (1995), L-Play (1996), and Impossible Marriage (1998).

Her film work continued, with screenplays for Nobody’s Fool in 1986 and Come West with Me in 1998. In addition, she wrote a teleplay for the PBS television series Trying Times. Henley has continued to create works for the stage with plays such as Family Week (2000), Ridiculous Fraud (2004), and The Jacksonian (2012). In 2000-2001, a two-volume collection of her plays was published by Smith and Krauss. Prior to 2022, Henley served as the President’s Professor of Theatre Arts at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California.

Analysis

Henley has always been able to bring a sense of truth to the stage. This ability is, no doubt, enhanced by her background in acting, but she is also gifted with the ability to create dialogue that leaps forward as interesting, compelling, and at the same time, honest, everyday talk. Her view of life is comic, dark, and often violent, but beneath the bizarre situations in her plays is the commitment to life and to salvation obtained through deep love and companionship.

Henley is a very economical playwright in the sense that she is able to make her statements using a small number of characters interacting over a limited period of time, often just within a twenty-four hour period. Moreover, her use of space is frugal: Sometimes, she uses a single room, with never more than one or two scene changes required (and those are usually at act breaks, not scene breaks). Finally, Henley’s total universe is minute. Most of her plays are set in small towns in the southern United States. Such economy makes it possible to bring power and tension to every scene because there is little need for constant exposition about where, when, and what is happening to whom.

It is the economy of time, place, and characters that allows Henley to create sufficient tension in her story to force out the hidden truths and extraordinary actions of ordinary, small-town people. The action of Crimes of the Heart, for example, takes place entirely in the kitchen of the home of the Magrath sisters in Hazelhurst, Mississippi. From the beginning, the gas oven is seen, and it is this device that brings the play to its resolution, as Babe attempts suicide by placing her head inside the oven.

The events of The Wake of Jamey Foster all occur in Marshael Foster’s home, where several areas are seen simultaneously: an area outside the house, the parlor, stairs and a landing, and Marshael’s bedroom. There is a change of scenery in The Miss Firecracker Contest, but that is accomplished between acts. Because of her economies, Henley is able to concentrate on three dominant themes: the complexity of desire even in the most ordinary people, the desperate need all humans have for love and companionship, and the redemptive power of any type of true love.

In Crimes of the Heart, for example, Meg, who has spent her life in casual sexual liaisons, finds happiness at last when her old boyfriend, Doc Porter, tells her he has always loved her. Even though he is married with children, Meg’s one final night with Doc Porter brings an end to her search for love and leaves her happy. Such happiness is not found by her sister Babe, who has been driven by social forces into a loveless marriage, one she tries to escape by shooting her husband. Babe’s older sister, Lenny, has long ago lost her love, Charlie. When Babe attempts to commit suicide, she is saved by Lenny and further uplifted when she becomes enamored of her young lawyer, who has found a way to keep her from prison.

The two, now happily-in-love sisters convince Lenny to call her old friend, Charlie, who indicates that he still has affection for Lenny. The play ends with the three sisters, redeemed by love and saved from loneliness by one another, singing a grand celebratory birthday song to Lenny in the glow of candlelight.

In Henley’s works, small-town people suffer from loneliness and lack of love just as do big-city people. All are capable of extreme grotesqueries. In one instance, a woman hangs her cat and herself so that she will not die alone. In more than one of Henley’s plays, women engage in promiscuous sex in search of love and in order to escape loneliness. Indeed, the need to find loving companionship is what seems to bring all families, especially those of sisters, together in Henley’s works.

Interestingly, food plays an important role in love and companionship. Of course, food is a common social device in small southern towns, where visitors are immediately offered something to eat and drink. In Henley’s plays, food substitutes for companionship. The opening action of The Wake of Jamey Foster, for example, finds Marshael Foster biting off the ears of a large chocolate Easter bunny and chewing on them slowly as she reads a magazine. She is alone with only food for companionship. Sometimes this use of food to ease isolation becomes entirely dark and grotesque, as when one character drops a large slice of ham on a corpse and then picks it up and eats it. At other times, food is a comic metaphor as in the exclamation: “Oh Lord and butter.” Not infrequently, food is a dark indication of malice or hate, as when the mistress of her dead husband sends Marshael a pie to be served at the wake; Marshael smashes the pie on the floor.

Names, or rather nicknames, are another means by which to seek and show affection and companionship. This playful use of monikers is especially prevalent among family members. In The Miss Firecracker Contest, Carnelle is often called Carnation by her sister, and Carnelle’s seamstress is called Popeye because of her unusually large eyes. In The Wake of Jamey Foster, Collard is affectionately referred to as Collard Greens, while the much disliked sister-in-law has her name shorted from Katherine to Katty.

Henley’s characters often commit the gravest of transgressions, but the author always treats these as comic grotesqueries, never as melodramatic sins. One husband dies while he is on a drunken binge with another woman. His death is caused not by some grand act; it occurs because he gets kicked in the head by a cow. In The Miss Firecracker Contest, the promiscuous lead character, aptly named Carnelle, transmits venereal disease to her lover, but he rejects treatment because he already has a fatal disease. Also, his love is great enough that he forgives Carnelle. Indeed, this is Henley’s point: Ordinary humans, capable of considerable misconduct, in the end will not be saved by some grand ideal or by deep religious faith. One survives, and even triumphs in small but real ways, through genuine human love and companionship.

Crimes of the Heart

First produced: 1979 (first published, 1982)

Type of work: Play

The three Magrath sisters gather at the family home to aid their sister, Babe, who has just shot her husband.

Crimes of the Heart, Henley’s best-known and most widely produced play, concerns the three adult Magrath sisters. As it is a family play, it is set in the kitchen of Granddaddy Magrath’s home in the small town of Hazelhurst, Mississippi. The sisters had come to live in the house when they were young because their father had deserted their mother. The house also holds the tragic memory of their mother committing suicide by hanging herself in the basement. In a darkly grotesque act, the mother had also hanged her old cat beside her.

The eldest sister, Lenny, now lives in the house and cares for her dying grandfather. The middle sister, Meg, has gone to California to pursue a singing career, and the youngest sister, Babe, has married the most prominent man in Hazelhurst. The sisters reunite after Babe shoots and seriously wounds her husband because, she claims, she does not like his looks. There is tension among the sisters, a tension exacerbated by their cousin, Chick, who wants to make all the family decisions concerning the sickly grandfather.

Lenny is having difficulty handling the stress. Her ongoing problem is that she has a shrunken ovary and cannot have children. Because of this malady, she turned away from her only love, Charlie. Babe, on the other hand, married early, but she now despises her husband and has had an affair with Willie Ray, a teenage African American boy. Meg, it is revealed, has failed in her singing career and is now working as a clerk in a dog food company.

To reduce tension and reapproach one another, the sisters spend time eating and drinking, alone or with one another. Food becomes a way of digesting emotions and easing irritations. A young lawyer, Barnett Lloyd, appears and announces he will discredit Babe’s husband because of the husband’s shady past. Unfortunately, when photographs of Babe with her lover Willie Ray are produced, the case looks bad. Good things happen, though. Meg’s old boyfriend, Doc Porter, shows up, and the two spend a happy night together watching the moon from Doc’s pickup truck.

One sister is now happy, but Babe is so despondent that she attempts suicide by putting her head in the gas oven. Luckily, Lenny discovers her, and, as Babe is recovering, Barnett Lloyd, who has become enamored of Babe, returns to announce that he has so much incriminating evidence about her husband’s shady dealings that a legal case can be settled out of court. All seems well, but then Old Granddaddy has a stroke and is expected to die. The Magrath sisters, however, now feel able to handle the issue. Only Lenny is without a new love. Her sisters convince her to call Charlie, and she does so, reluctantly, only to discover that he still loves her.

Now the three sisters have one another as companions, as well as each having someone to love. They realize what motivated their mother to hang herself with the cat: to have someone to love. It is Lenny’s birthday, and the sisters light candles on a huge cake and begin to eat together, sharing food and love.

The Wake of Jamey Foster

First produced: 1982 (first published, 1983)

Type of work: Play

Jamey Foster has just died, and brothers and sisters on both sides of the family are gathered for the wake at the Foster home, where tensions run high.

Henley sets The Wake of Jamey Foster in a small Mississippi town where friends and family gather after Jamey Foster dies after a drunken midnight escapade in which he is kicked in the head by a cow. Wayne Foster, Jamey’s younger brother and a bank officer, attempts to establish a sense of dignity. He is aided by his wife, Katty. They fail because Jamey’s wife, Marshael, her sister Collard, and her brother Leon are not easily described as respectable. Collard comes to the wake from a wild party in Memphis in a bright red evening gown and cowboy boots. Leon is rather simpleminded and is more concerned with his new girlfriend, Pixrose, than with the dignity of the funeral. Indeed, he arranges for Jamey’s body to be dressed in a bright plaid smoking jacket because it seems cheerful.

Throughout the day and night of the wake, tension grows, forcing the revelation of several secrets. Jamey Foster had left his wife and was living with another woman when his fatal accident occurred. The reason Jamey left Marshael was because she secretly sent the scholarly manuscript he was writing to a publisher, who then notified Jamey that it was worthless. Jamey’s brother blames Marshael for Jamey’s death.

Wayne also dislikes his wife, Katty, partly because her father is his boss at the bank. Wayne is also disappointed because she has had several miscarriages and appears not to be able to have children. Leon, Marshael’s brother, works at a turkey processing plant and collects empty Coke bottles for additional income. The audience learns that his girlfriend, Pixrose, has just left an orphanage where she was injured in a fire deliberately set by other orphans. She is accident-prone and adds to the tensions by inadvertently causing a fire in the kitchen and then dropping and breaking dishes. Collard, Marshael’s younger sister, has emotional difficulties. After learning she was not bright enough to go to law school, she left home and has been living a proper life.

A final visitor at the wake, Brocker Slade, actually comes to apologize to Marshael for kissing her and then, in a fit of shame, deserting her in the middle of a rainstorm. To assuage the mounting tensions, there is a good bit of heavy eating and drinking, including much nibbling on Easter candies. The drinking leads to more uncontrolled actions, such as Brocker Slade’s attempt, having been rebuffed by Marshael, to climb up the side of the house to her bedroom. He fails, and his failure is repeated by Wayne Foster, whose attempt to kiss and embrace Pixrose is foiled by his wife. Perhaps most devastating of all, Marshael receives as a funeral gift a pie baked by her late husband’s mistress. Raging, she smashes the pie on the floor.

Love and companionship finally triumph. The four women—Marshael, Collard, Katty, and Pixrose—share a night’s conversation, confessing their past sorrows and looking for new hope. In the morning, Marshael decides not to attend the funeral of her estranged husband. She lies in her bedroom, and from the yard below Brocker Slade calls to her. He agrees to go buy Easter candy for her children, then lovingly sings a song for her as she falls asleep.

The Miss Firecracker Contest

First produced: 1980 (first published, 1985)

Type of work: Play

Cousins gather at the time of their hometown’s Fourth-of-July pageant.

As are most of Henley’s works, this play is set in a small southern town. In Delmont, Mississippi, a beauty pageant, the Miss Firecracker contest, is held every Fourth of July. Carnelle Scott is a contestant in this year’s pageant, in which two of her cousins are also involved. The cousins have actually assembled because the aunt who raised Carnelle has died, and her two children, Carnelle’s cousins Elain and Delmount, have returned home to settle matters. The house has been left to Delmount, who has just been released from a mental institution.

In addition to violent behavior, Delmount is guilty of statutory rape, years ago, of some young girls. Elain is seeking asylum because she has just left her husband. Carnelle realizes that she will have to vacate the family home, but not before she leaves town in a blaze of glory as Miss Firecracker, a title won some years before by her beautiful cousin Elain.

While death or attempted murder might drive the conflicts in previous Henley plays, the tension here is in the preparations for the big pageant. The audience learns that neither Elain nor Delmount feels Carnelle has a chance, in part because of her previous habit of having casual sex with so many men, apparently seeking love because she was abandoned by her father after her mother’s death. Indeed, the local name for Carnelle is not Miss Firecracker but Miss Hot Tamales.

Two other characters soon appear: Popeye, the young seamstress who aids Carnelle with her costumes, and Mac Sam, the man selling balloons at the pageant. It is revealed that Mac Sam is a former lover of Carnelle. He is now dying of several illnesses, including a venereal disease Carnelle transmitted to him. (She is now cured.) To add to the complications, Popeye falls in love with Delmount, and the stage manager of the pageant turns out to be one of the women Delmount raped years ago.

At the contest, everything goes wrong, from a poorly altered costume to the audience yelling insults at Carnelle. The ultimate disappointment is that Carnelle finishes last, but as in most of Henley’s work, love carries the day. Elain returns to her husband. Mac Sam declares his undying devotion to Carnelle, and Delmount receives indications of devotion from two women. The play ends in delight and companionship, with Carnelle, now reconciled to leaving town, watching the Independence Day fireworks.

Summary

Henley centers her dramatic statements on small numbers of people, usually members of the same family and more often than not the women of that family. Henley draws upon the culture she knew when growing up: small-town life in the southern United States. Her language is colorful, and her plays are characterized by violence and dark, grotesque humor in which husbands are shot by wives because they are annoyed with them or casual lovers pass on diseases. Food is a typical metaphor, and puns include the nickname Carnelle, short for Cornelia, denoting a promiscuous woman. Henley seeks to show that love and close companionship are the only real sources of human solace and redemption.

Bibliography

Brantley, Ben. "The Sweet Smell of Decay Pervades a Whodunit." Review of The Jacksonian, by Beth Henley, directed by Robert Falls. The New York Times, 7 Nov. 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/11/08/theater/reviews/the-jacksonian-stars-ed-harris-at-the-acorn-theater.html. Accessed 7 Oct. 2024.

Bryer, Jackson R., ed. The Playwright’s Art: Conversations with Contemporary American Dramatists. Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995.

Fesmire, Julia A., ed. Beth Henley: A Casebook. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Haedicke, Janet V. “‘A Population (and Theater) at Risk’: Battered Women in Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart and Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind.” Modern Drama 36, no. 1 (1993): 83-95.

Harbin, Billy J. “Familial Bonds in the Plays of Beth Henley.” Southern Quarterly 25 (Spring, 1987): 81-94.

Hargrove, Nancy D. “The Tragicomic Vision of Beth Henley’s Drama.” Southern Quarterly 22 (Summer, 1984): 54-70.

Henley, Beth. "'Whatever That Means': On Being a Southern Playwright." Interview by Dan O'Brien. HowlRound, Emerson College, 28 Sept. 2011, howlround.com/an-interview-with-beth-henley. Accessed 7 Oct. 2024.

Jaehne, Karen. “Beth’s Beauties.” Film Comment 25 (May/June, 1989): 9-12.

Jones, John Griffin, ed. “Beth Henley.” In Mississippi Writers Talking. Vol. 1. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1982.

Karpinski, Joanne B. “The Ghosts of Chekhov’s Three Sisters Haunt Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart.” In Modern American Drama: The Female Canon, edited by June Schlueter. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990.

McDonnell, Lisa J. “Diverse Similitude: Beth Henley and Marsha Norman.” Southern Quarterly 25 (Spring, 1987): 95-104.

Plunka, Gene A. The Plays of Beth Henley: A Critical Study. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2005.

Tinnin, Marilyn. “Mississippi Legends: Beth Henley." Magnolia Tribune, 7 July 2024, magnoliatribune.com/2024/07/07/mississippi-legends-beth-henley/.  Accessed 7 Oct. 2024.