Since Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart premiered over 30 years ago, it has been celebrated as a feminine flip-side to Sam Shepard’s darkly comic tales of the heartland. A story in the Southern gothic mode, it nonetheless balances the darkness with an ample amount of sweet, like the heaps of sugar Babe Magrath stirs into her beloved lemonade.
We know Babe likes to make lemonade, incidentally, because she tells her lawyer, describing how she went to the kitchen to whip up a batch right after shooting her husband in the stomach.
The shooting incident is what brings the three Magrath sisters together, back to their childhood home, where the spinsterish Lenny has been taking care of “Ol’ Grandaddy” for quite a while. He’s now in the hospital, and the Three Sisters gather to reminisce, catch up, and perhaps even keep Babe out of prison.
The glance toward the world of Chekhov isn’t accidental. Henley aspires to that unique blend of laughter and tears perfected by our greatest modern dramatist. And often, she delivers. It’s a fragile balance, and if it works well, we laugh right along with the sisters when they crack up at the news that Grandaddy has slipped into a coma.
And we do. The roles are as juicy as they get, and Milwaukee Chamber Theatre has assembled a group of actors that jump in without a life preserver. As the Magrath sisters, Laura Gray, Georgina McKee and Laura Frye create an onstage family that shows the sisterly connection in camaraderie as well as its shared craziness. Director Mary MacDonald Kerr is an actor’s director, and knows how to create an ensemble while allowing individuals to find their own path. At times, the group’s enthusiasm for the sisters’ manic energy and their Mississippi patois (in which words like “sad” are two syllables) keeps Henley’s deeper emotions from surfacing. But this is a believable – if somewhat fractured – world on stage.
Karen Estrada, Jonathan Wainwright and Neil Haven are great in their supporting roles. Wainwright’s scene with McKee, a lovely semi-rekindling of a lost romance, is one of the highlights of the play, primarily because it has a simplicity and stillness that captures the frustrated longing that saturates Henley’s world.
