Henley, Elizabeth Becker 1952–

(Beth Henley)

PERSONAL: Born May 8, 1952, in Jackson, MS; daughter of Charles Boyce (an attorney) and Elizabeth Josephine (an actress; maiden name, Becker) Henley. Education: Southern Methodist University, B.F.A., 1974; attended University of Illinois, 1975–76.

ADDRESSES: Home—Los Angeles, CA. Agent—Gilbert Parker, William Morris Agency, 1350 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10019.

CAREER: Actress and playwright. Theatre Three, Dallas, TX, actress, 1972–73; Southern Methodist University, Directors Colloquium, Dallas, member of acting ensemble, 1973; Dallas Minority Repertory Theatre, teacher of creative dramatics, 1974–75; University of Illinois, Urbana, teacher of beginning acting, Lessac voice technique, and playwriting, 1975–76. Actress, Great American People Show, summer, 1976; producer, Loretta Theatre, a production company.

AWARDS, HONORS: Cowinner of Great American Playwriting Contest, Actor's Theatre of Louisville, 1978, Susan Smith Blackburn Award nomination, 1979, New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best new American play, from Newsday, 1981, Pulitzer Prize for drama, 1981, and Antoinette Perry ("Tony") Award nomination for best play, 1981, all for Crimes of the Heart; Academy Award nomination for best adapted screenplay, 1986, for movie version of Crimes of the Heart.

WRITINGS:

Am I Blue (one-act play; first produced in Dallas, Texas, at Southern Methodist University Margo Jones Theatre, 1973), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1982.

Crimes of the Heart (three-act play; first produced in Louisville, KY, 1979; produced on Broadway at John Golden Theatre, November 4, 1981; revived in New York, NY, 2001; also see below), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1981.

Morgan's Daughters (script for television pilot), Paramount, 1979.

The Miss Firecracker Contest (two-act play; first produced in Los Angeles, CA, 1980; produced off-Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club, June, 1980; also see below), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1985.

The Wake of Jamey Foster (two-act play; first produced in Hartford, CT, 1982; produced on Broadway at Eugene O'Neill Theatre, October 14, 1982), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1985.

The Debutante Ball (play, first produced in Costa Mesa, CA, 1985), University Press of Mississippi (Jackson, MS), 1991.

(With Budge Threlkeld) Survival Guides (television script), Public Broadcasting System (Alexandria, VA), 1985.

Crimes of the Heart (screenplay; based on author's play of the same title), De Laurentiis Entertainment, 1986.

Nobody's Fool (screenplay), Island Pictures, 1986.

(With David Byrne and Stephen Tobolowsky) True Stories (screenplay), Warner Bros., 1986.

The Lucky Spot (play; first produced in Williamstown, MA, 1986; produced on Broadway at City Center Theatre, April, 1987), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1987.

Miss Firecracker (screenplay; based on her play), Corsair Pictures, 1988.

Abundance (play; produced in Los Angeles, CA, 1989), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1990.

Monologues for Women (play), Dramaline Publications (Rancho Mirage, CA), 1992.

(And director) Control Freaks (one-act play; produced in Los Angeles, CA, at Met Theater, 1993.

Beth Henley: Four Plays, Heinemann/Methuen (Portsmouth, NH), 1994.

L-Play (play), produced in Stockbridge, MA, 1996.

Come West with Me (screenplay; based on author's play Abundance), Twentieth Century-Fox, 1998.

Collected Plays, Volume I: 1980–1989, Smith & Kraus (Lyme, NH), 2000.

Collected Plays, Volume II: 1990–1999, Smith & Kraus (Lyme, NH), 2000.

Impossible Marriage (play), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1999.

Three Plays by Beth Henley, Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 2002.

Family Week (play), produced Off-Broadway, 2000.

Sisters of the Winter Madrigal (play), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 2001.

Signature (play), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 2003.

Revelers (play), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 2003.

Ridiculous Fraud (play), produced at Sundance Institute Theatre Lab, Sundance, UT, 2004.

Tight Pants (play), produced in Los Angeles, CA, at the MET Theater, 2004.

SIDELIGHTS: Beth Henley is a member of the new breed of American playwrights dedicated to preserving regional voices on the stage. In Henley's case, her Mississippi upbringing provides the background for a host of Southern-accented plays, one of which, the black comedy Crimes of the Heart, went on to win her a Pulitzer Prize when she was twenty-nine years of age. Like many playwrights before her, Henley originally set her sights on being an actress, but ventured into writing after deciding there were not many good contemporary roles for Southern women. A graduate of Southern Methodist University, Henley got her first play produced there, a one-act work titled Am I Blue. In 1976, she moved to Los Angeles to live with actor/director Stephen Tobolowsky, with whom she would later collaborate on the screenplay True Stories. Three years later Henley submitted a three-act play to the Great American Play Contest sponsored by Actors Theatre of Louisville, Kentucky. Henley's play, Crimes of the Heart, won the contest and there began the first of its many successful stagings.

Set in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, a few years after Hurricane Camille, passed through the area, the story centers on three eccentric sisters who converge in the home of the youngest, Babe, after she has shot her well-to-do husband because, as Babe puts it, "I didn't like his looks." The other sisters include Meg, a would-be singer who has struck out in Hollywood; and Lenny, single and desperate at age thirty. These sisters, according to Edith Oliver in a New Yorker review, the "walking wounded, who are in tears at one moment and giggling and hugging at the next,… are very much of the South, of Mississippi, and [novelist] Eudora Welty has prepared us for them." John Simon, reviewing the production for New York magazine, stated that "the play is an essence, the essence of provincial living." Simon further called Crimes of the Heart a "loving and teasing look back at deep-southern, small-town life, at the effect of constricted living and confined thinking on three different yet not wholly unalike sisters amid Chekhovian boredom in honeysuckle country, and, above all, at the sorely tried but resilient affection and loyalty of these sisters for one another."

Some critics took exception to Henley's use of ironic black humor in Crimes of the Heart. Michael Feingold, writing in the Village Voice, for instance, thought the playwright's attitude toward her three main characters, with its "pity and mockery aimed at them in laser-gun bursts," has "no organic connection and no deep roots. The play gives the impression of gossiping about its characters rather than presenting them, and [Henley's] voice, though both individual and skillful, is the voice of a small-town southern spinster yattering away on the phone, oozing pretended sympathy and real malice for her unfortunate subjects, and never at any point coming close to the truth of their lives." New Leader reviewer Leo Sauvage discovered "nothing enthralling in spending an evening with three badly adjusted, if not mentally retarded sisters, who are given free rein to exhibit their individual eccentricities," and dubbed Henley's humor "sick, not black."

Other reviewers saw more to value in Henley's work. Crimes of the Heart may be "overlong, occasionally cliched and annoyingly frivolous at moments," noted Daily News critic Don Nelson, "but Henley keeps intriguing us with a delightfully wacky humor plus a series of little mysteries played out by characters we can never dismiss as superficial on a set that absorbs us into their lives." "The physical modesty of her play belies the bounty of plot, peculiarity, and comedy within it," concluded Saturday Review writer Scot Haller of Henley's effort. "Like Flannery O'Connor, Henley creates ridiculous characters but doesn't ridicule them. Like Lanford Wilson, she examines ordinary people with extraordinary compassion. Treating the eccentricities of her characters with empathy, [Henley] manages to render strange turns of events not only believable but affecting."

Crimes of the Heart was nominated for a Tony award when first produced and subsequently adapted by its author into movie form, the screenplay of which was nominated for an Academy award. In a review of the movie adaptation for the New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann wrote, "Comic Beth Henley has adapted her play for the screen with careful balance … maintain[ing] the poise of her exceptionally good play … keep[ing] the braided deception and truth of the original." A review by Peter Travers for People was less flattering: "The seams in Henley's play … show up more glaringly when blown up to wide screen size," Travers maintained, adding that "Henley's saving grace is her antic humor." In 2001, a revival of Crimes of the Heart opened at the Second Stage Theater in New York City. The play starred Amy Ryan, Mary Catherine Garrison, and Enid Graham, and was directed by Garry Hynes.

Henley's screenplay True Stories takes a look at "the petty bourgeois customs, the media hype, the bloated vulgarities of American small-town life," according to Kauffmann in another review for the New Republic. In the film, director and cowriter David Byrne, the lead singer of the Talking Heads, serves as a tour guide to this mythical Texas town, driving around in a red convertible showing viewers the oh-so-local sites and scenery. According to Kauffmann, "The result has the shape, designed yet seemingly casual, of Monty Python scripts but very little of their incisive wit…. The catalog of cartoons along the way is trite and not often funny." A People critic called True Stories one of 1986's "most notable and offbeat films," and Henley, "one of the 25 Most Intriguing People of '86…. She earned her 1986 merit badge by wielding a wicked wit."

In other work for film in addition to True Stories and Crimes of the Heart, Henley adapted her play The Miss Firecracker Contest into a screenplay, and also wrote an original screenplay, Nobody's Fool. In The Miss Firecracker Contest, a ne'er-do-well young woman, Carnelle Scott, seeks to uplift her station in her small Mississippi town; in hopes of gaining respect she hopes to win the "Miss Firecracker" beauty contest, a rather cheesy local affair. To that end, Carnelle enlists other outcasts in her town to aid in her quest. As the play version opens, Carnelle is seen on a bare stage dressed in a leotard and draped in an American flag, tap-dancing and baton-twirling her way through the "Star-Spangled Banner." "Though [the playwright's] territory looks superficially like the contemporary American South," wrote Time's Richard Schickel, "it is really a country of the mind: one of Tennessee Williams' provinces that has surrendered to a Chekhovian raiding party, perhaps. Her strength is a wild anecdotal inventiveness, but her people, lost in the ramshackle dreams and tumble-down ambitions with which she invests them, often seem to be metaphors waywardly adrift. They are blown this way and that by the gales of laughter they provoke, and they frequently fail to find a solid connection with clear and generally relevant meaning." Unfortunately for Henley, The Miss Firecracker Contest did not last long on the boards.

Nobody's Fool focuses on a frustrated young Arizona woman working as a waitress and trying to allow a new love into her life while living with the memories of a past one. According to Kauffmann, Nobody's Fool is "about helplessness and its counterfeit armor, about a young woman in the grip of a destructive sexual attraction who is ultimately saved by another lover—who may or may not turn out to be equally hurtful." In Kauffmann's words, the screenplay for Nobody's Fool is "authentic, unique [and] rounded." Henley "writes with a unique voice, quiet, comic, even whimsical, but with hidden venom." In an interview with Mark Lee for Written By, Henley said of Nobody's Fool: "It's very different to create something from scratch than having the great mercy of having source material. Over the years I've learned how to think more visually and let go of dialogue and visualize the movement of the film."

Henley's other screenplays, for both film and television, include the draft of the screenplay for the film version of Annie Proulx's novel The Shipping News, coauthoring the television script Survival Guides for public television, and penning the teleplay Ruby McCullough, based on a true story of a Southern black woman. Henley also wrote the script for the televison pilot Morgan's Daughters, served as a writer for the Public Broadcasting Service special Trying Times, and wrote a CBS television movie titled Meant to Be, that starred actors Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen.

Other early plays by Henley include The Wake of Jamey Foster, The Debutante Ball, The Lucky Spot, Monologues for Women, and L-Plays which were produced at venues across the country, from New England and New York, to Chicago and California. More popular have been her longer works, among them Impossible Marriage, Signature, and Sisters of the Winter Madrigal, while other plays have been less successful. Keeping with her Southern theme, Henley sets Impossible Marriage in Savannah, Georgia, and relates the story of a young woman whose upcoming marriage is opposed by her older, and very pregnant, sister, as well as by others. A TheaterMania.com reviewer called Impossible Marriage "a surprisingly—for Henley, at least—upbeat family saga that served as a reminder of the power of her distinctive, theatrical voice," while in the Long Island Business News, Richard Scholem commented: "It's impossible to keep a straight face watching Beth Henley's Impossible Marriage…. Its … bigger-than-life … characters are deliciously overwrought, over dramatic, over magnified and over the edge."

In Signature, another successful venture for Henley, the playwright takes a "high-tech, sci-fi, bizarrely futuristic look at Hollywood, where marriage is a career choice and everyone is desperate to make his or her mark on an indifferent world," according to Terri Roberts, in a review for Back Stage West. Citing a New York Times review, Roberts added that "Henley is on a word high. Those words dizzyingly play, collide, enlighten, ceaselessly question, and even give answers with wit and without avoidance." As Roberts quoted Henley herself, the playwright noted: "I was fascinated that Los Angeles is really about people who have come out here to make a signature, to make a mark, to not live and have a family and do a job and die in the place where they were born…. Everything seems so new and dangerous…. I like that notion for the play—that all these people are just on the edge and don't really know how to behave at all." In another Back Stage West review, Dany Margolies commented that the play's "characters range from unsettlingly slightly off-kilter personalities to the outrageously psychotic ones that seem comfortingly familiar."

Sisters of the Winter Madrigal is a one-act play that could have been longer, according to Laura Weinert in her review for Back Stage West. The play, Weinert asserted, seems to "yearn for expansion into [a] full-length play…. Rarely do we leave the theatre wishing the playwright had written more words." Henley's play, set in a rural town in a time long ago, focuses on two orphaned sisters, the town whore, and a betrothed cowhearder who is trying to wiggle out of a marriage in favor of a better offer. "One can't help but wonder what heights [the actors] might reach if [the play was] given an entire evening to fill and … able to build to more meaningful denouements," summarized the critic.

Diverting from her prominent theme of female bonding, Henley's Ridiculous Fraud is a comedy set in New Orleans about the relationship among three adult brothers, each trying to cope with the fact that their father is serving time for committing a "ridiculous fraud." Henley had the opportunity to develop this play, which was commissioned by the McCarter Theater Center of the Performing Arts in Princeton, New Jersey, at the Sundance Institute Theater Laboratory, in Sundance, Utah. Tight Pants is a one-act play exploring an erotic triangle. Daryl Miller, writing in the Los Angeles Times, noted in a review of the play's production that Henley's "deft writing is matched by spot-on acting and sharp directing." A contributor to the Maestro Theatre Web site called the farce "as odd as it is funny."

Many of Henley's plays have been incorporated into collections, including two volumes that together comprise much of her oeuvre, the two-volume Collected Plays. In a review for Library Journal, Thomas Luddy hailed the appearance of the work, noting that it "reveals a consistently excellent body of work from a distinctive voice of the American theater…. As this set reveals, Henley's most important contribution to the theater is her memorable gallery of women characters, which has kept her plays alive on stages across the country." Jack Helbig agreed, stating in Booklist that both volumes are "most welcome…. Henley wittily introduces each play and, as she does, sprinkles fascinating recollections of actors and directors involved in the premiere productions."

Henley's plays continue to be produced across the United States and internationally and have been translated into over ten languages. Her stage, movie, and television productions have starred a host of well-known actors, among them, Rosanna Arquette, Ted Danson, Holly Hunter, Diane Keaton, Jessica Lange, Carol Kane, Swoosie Kurtz, Laraine Newman, Tim Robbins, Sam Shepard, and Sissy Spacek. As actor Hunter told an online interviewer for TheaterMania.com, Henley "is an original observer…. And she is not really swayed by what other people think in terms of how she navigates her own life…. Beth keeps her unique point of view solidly intact."

In an interview with Mark Lee for Written By, Henley explained that in writing for both stage and film, she has had to bring different considerations to bear, particularly in adapting works from one medium to another. "The impulse of the theater will always be something about being there. And the fact that you can laugh and the person will react or not react. Or you can shout at them to stop, and they will hear you. The vitality of that is something I find overwhelming. Film is so different. I love that you can send that film out, and people can see it in countries that you've never been to, and you can touch people's hearts that can't get out of their village. They're being given a new perspective on the world. The influence of film is amazing. It can make your stories even more powerful."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 23, 1983.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1986, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1987.

PERIODICALS

Back Stage, August 6, 1993, Rob Kendt, review of Control Freaks, p. 8.

Back Stage West, October 12, 2000, review of Signature, p. 18; July 19, 2001, Laura Weinert, review of Sisters of the Winter Madrigal, p. 12.

Booklist, June 1, 2000, Jack Helbig, review of Collected Plays, Volume I: 1980–1989 and Collected Plays, Volume II: 1990–1999, p. 1836.

Chicago Sun-Times, April 28, 1989, Roger Ebert, review of Miss Firecracker.

Daily News (New York, NY), November 5, 1981.

Library Journal, October 15, 1991.

Long Island Business News, November 6, 1998, Benjamin Scholem, review of Impossible Marriage, p. 38.

Los Angeles Times, April 16, 1983; May 7, 2004, Daryl H. Miller, review of Tight Pants.

New Leader, November 30, 1981.

New Republic, November 10, 1986, Stanley Kauffmann, review of True Stories, p. 26; December 15, 1986, Stanley Kauffmann, review of Nobody's Fool, p. 22; February 2, 1987, Stanley Kauffmann, review of Crimes of the Heart, p. 26; December 17, 1990, Robert Brustein, review of Abundance, p. 28.

Newsday, August 27, 1996.

Newsweek, December 22, 1986; May 1, 1989.

New York, November 16, 1981; May 11, 1987; May 15, 1989; November 12, 1990.

New Yorker, January 12, 1981; May 11, 1987; May 29, 1989; November 12, 1990.

New York Times, June 8, 1979; December 22, 1980; February 15, 1981; April 14, 1981; June 10, 1981; June 11, 1981; October 25, 1981; November 5, 1981; December 28, 1981; April 14, 1982; May 28, 1984; November 2, 1986.

New York Times Magazine, May 1, 1983.

People, December 15, 1986, Peter Travers, review of Crimes of the Heart (movie), p. 12; December 22, 1986, "The 25 Most Intriguing People of '86," p. 91.

Playbill, July 5, 2004, Kenneth Jones, "Beth Henley, Joe Hortua, Tectonic Theatre, Stephen Dillane Work in 2004 Sundance Theatre Lab July 5-25."

Saturday Review, November, 1981; January, 1982.

Time, June 11, 1984; December 22, 1986; May 1, 1989.

Variety, May 10, 1989; August 9, 1993; April 17, 2000, Charles Isherwood, review of Family Week, p. 34.

Village Voice, November 18, 1981.

Washington Post, December 12, 1986. Written By, June-July 2000, Mark Lee, interview with Henley.

ONLINE

Maestro Web site, http://www.maestro.ws/arts/ (April, 2004), "Beth Henley."

Met Theater Web site, http://www.7metshorts.com/ (July 31, 2004), review of Tight Pants.

TheaterMania.com, http://www.theatermania.com/ (April 11, 2000), Kathy Henderson, review of Family Week.

Univerity of Mississippi, Department of English Web site, http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/english/ (July 29, 2004), "Beth Henley."