stroke has seen to that. More important, Babe and Meg and Lenny have taken the first tentative steps toward deciding their futures for themselves.

Absurdity Much like the playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd, Henley dramatizes a vision of a disordered universe in which characters are isolated from one another and are incapable of meaningful action. With the constant frustration of their dreams and hopes, Henley's characters could easily find their lives completely meaningless and absurd (and indeed, each of the MaGrath sisters has been on the brink of giving up entirely). At the end of Crimes of the Heart, at least, the sisters have found a kind of unity in the face of adversity. While Lenny's vision, "something about the three of us smiling and laughing together," in no way can resolve the many conflicts that have unfolded in the course of the play, it does endow their lives with a collective sense of hope, where before each had felt acutely the absurdity, and often the hopelessness, of life.

Death Reminders of death are everywhere in Crimes of the Heart: the sisters are haunted by the memory of their mother's suicide; Babe has shot and seriously wounded her husband; Lenny learns that her beloved childhood horse has been struck by lightning and killed; Old Granddaddy has a second stroke and is apparently near death; Babe attempts suicide twice near the end of the play. Perhaps even stronger than these reminders of physical death, however, are the images of emotional or spiritual death in the play. Lenny, for example, has rejected Charlie, her only suitor in recent years, because she feels worthless and fears rejection herself. Meg, meanwhile, has experienced a psychotic episode in Los Angeles and has prevented herself from loving anyone in order to avoid feeling vulnerable. Significant transitions occur near the end of the play, individual "rebirths" which preface the significant rebirth of a sense of unity among the sisters: Lenny gains the courage to call her suitor, and finds him receptive; Meg, in the course of spending a night out with Doc, is surprised to learn that she "could care about someone," and sings "all nightlong" out of joy; and finally, Babe has a moment of enlightenment in which she understands that their mother hanged the family cat along with herself because "she was afraid of dying all alone.'' This revelation allows her to put to rest finally the painful memory of the mother's suicide, and paves the way for the moment of sisterly love at the conclusion of the play.

Good and Evil Henley challenges the audience's sense of good and evil by making them like characters who have committed crimes of passion. "I thought I'd like to write about somebody who shoots somebody else just for being mean," Henley said in Saturday Review. "Then I got intrigued with the idea of the audience's not finding fault with her character, finding sympathy for her." While Babe's case constitutes the primary exploration of good and evil in the play, the conflict between Meg and her sisters is another example of Henley presenting a number of perspectives on a character's actions in order to complicate her audience's notions of good and bad behavior. Lenny and Babe find many of Meg's actions (abandoning Doc after his accident, lying to Granddaddy about her career in Hollywood) to be dishonest and selfish, but the sisters eventually learn to understand Meg's motivations and to forgive her. Through this process, Henley suggests the sheer complexity of human psychology and behavior—that often, actions cannot be easily labeled "good" or "evil" in a strict sense.

Limitations and Opportunities Virtually all the characters, to some extent, have throughout their lives been limited in their choices, experiencing a severe lack of opportunity. Lenny, in particular, resents having had to take upon herself so much responsibility for the family (especially for Old Granddaddy). Much of Babe's difficulty in her marriage to Zackery, meanwhile, seems to have grown out the fact that she did not choose him but was pressured by her grandfather into marrying the successful lawyer. Meg, however, at least to Lenny and Babe, appears to have had endless opportunity. Lenny wonders at one point: "Why, do you remember how Meg always got to wear twelve jingle bells on her petticoats, while we were only allowed to wear three apiece? Why?!" Lenny is clearly fixating on a minor issue from childhood, but one she feels is representative of the preferential treatment Meg received. The bells are, she says to Meg later, a "specific example of how you always got what you wanted!" Meg, however, has learned a hard lesson in Hollywood about opportunity and success. Old Granddaddy has always told her: "With your talent, all you need is exposure. Then you can make your own breaks!" Contrary to this somewhat simplistic optimism, however, Meg's difficulty sustaining a singing career suggests that opportunity is actually quite rare, and not necessarily directly connected to talent or one's will to succeed.

Public vs. Private Life When Babe reveals to Meg her affair with Willie Jay, she admits that she's "so worried about his getting public exposure." This is a necessary concern for public opinion, as Willie Jay might physically be in danger as a result of such exposure. Chick, meanwhile, has what Henley characterizes as an unhealthy concern for public perception — she cares much more about what the rest of the town thinks of her than she does about any of her cousins. Immediately upon her entrance at the beginning of the play, Chick focuses not so much upon Babe's shooting of Zackery, but rather on how the event will affect her, personally: “How I'm gonna continue holding my head up high in this community, I do not know." Similarly, in criticizing Meg for abandoning Doc, Chick thinks primarily of her own public stature: "Well, his mother was going to keep me out of the Ladies' Social League because of it.'' Near the end of the play, Lenny becomes infuriated over Chick calling Meg "a low-class tramp," and chases her cousin out of the house. This moment of family solidarity is a significant turning point, in which Lenny clearly indicates that the private, family unity the three sisters are able to achieve by the end of the play is far more important than the public perception of the family within the town.

Violence and Cruelty Accompanying the exploration of good and evil in Crimes of the Heart are its insights into violence and cruelty. While Babe has ostensibly committed the most violent act in the play by shooting Zackery in the stomach, the audience is persuaded to side with her in the face of the violence wrought by Zackery upon both Babe (domestic violence stemming, as Babe says, from him "hating me, 'cause I couldn't laugh at his jokes''), and, in a jealous rage, on Willie Jay. There occur other, less prominent acts of cruelty in the course of the play, as well as numerous ones the audience learns about through exposition (such as Meg's abandonment of Doc following his injury). In the end, Henley encourages the audience to take a less absolute view of what constitutes cruelty, to understand some of the underlying reasons behind the actions of her characters, and to join in the sense of forgiveness and acceptance which dominates the conclusion of Crimes of the Heart.