[In the following essay, Karpinski notes the similarities between The Three Sisters and Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart, which include a trio of females, the domestic setting, and humorous elements.]

In Mississippi Writers Talking, Beth Henley identifies herself more with an older tradition of playwrights than with her contemporaries (in a prose style that may cause the gentle reader to doubt the assertion):

I mainly read old things. I missed a lot of reading when I was young, so I like to read more classical stuff … They told me, “They're not doing three-act plays anymore,” and I went “They're not? Wow! Back when I was reading plays they were doing them.”¹

The name of Anton Chekhov is prominent in her discussion:

I had read Tennessee Williams and Chekhov, and I think they're great … Chekhov and Shakespeare, of course, are my favorite playwrights. Chekhov, I feel he influenced me more than anyone else … ²

Henley doesn't mention Three Sisters specifically, although in a telephone conversation with the author she did say she had Three Sisters in mind when writing Crimes of the Heart. It may seem premature to compare a playwright's first work (albeit a Pulitzer Prize winner) to the epitome of Chekhov's dramatic oeuvre, but similarities of plot, setting, theme, characterization, and comic technique invite such a comparison, and the results help to clarify the successes and shortcomings in Henley's art at this early stage of its development.

Perhaps the most obvious parallel between the two works is the presence in both of three sisters. The impetus for Henley's choice is biographical, although “my mother isn't dead with suicide, my sister hasn't shot her husband, you know, my sister doesn't have a missing ovary.”³ What Henley's dramatized siblings chiefly have in common with Chekhov's is a sense of blighted expectations about work and love. Lenny, like Olga, has aged prematurely in a self-defeating effort to carry out a nurturing role and never expects to have a man of her own; Babe, like Masha, feels stuck in an inappropriate marriage and finds a more sympathetic partner outside this bond; Meg, like Irina, gets sidetracked into a meaningless job despite lofty career aspirations and has doubts about making a commitment to a man who truly loves her.

The MaGraths and the Prozorovs both endure the “soul-killing ennui of a provincial town,” but their efforts “to deal with the commonplace reality of life are ineffectual and unrealistic.”⁴ Despite the surface gaiety of their interactions,⁵ the sisters reveal themselves as isolated to the point of desperation. Their isolation manifests itself in petty unkindnesses such as Meg's taking one bite out of each of Lenny's birthday chocolates or Olga's refusal to listen to Masha's confidence about falling in love with a married man.⁶ All the sisters suffer the vexations of a more energetic, vulgar female antagonist, although Chick in Crimes functions more as an externalization of the MaGraths' self-doubts than as a genuine force of dramatic opposition. These female antagonists represent “lesser potentials, unworthy of realization according to Chekhov's [and Henley's] values”:

… their actual presence makes even more poignant the sense of deprivation resulting from the non-fulfillment of the greater potential. Thus, for instance, in Three Sisters Natasha and Kulygin fully realize their meagre, narrow potentials and feel themselves fulfilled, satisfied people. … ⁷

Most important, both sets of sisters have inherited a suffocating value system, reenforced by their emotional ties to a dominating male figure not present on the stage. The MaGraths' nascent triumphs over their dreary heritage contrast with the Prozorovs' dispersal and defeat in the service of their glorious but paralyzing tradition. This difference in outcome results from the antithetical attitudes the two families hold about the past, and from what René Girard would characterize as the relative force that “mediated desire” exerts in the lives of Henley's and Chekhov's protagonists.

When Henley remarked, “Both are about overcoming ghosts of the past and letting go of what other people have said you are,”⁸ she was characterizing the similarity of theme in Crimes and her later work The Miss Firecracker Contest, but the description pertains to The Three Sisters as well. The Prozorov and the MaGrath sisters both begin the dramatic action under the sway of life expectations established by a patriarchal figure who never appears on stage. The Prozorovs' father has been dead for a year, and Old Granddaddy MaGrath lies comatose in the hospital, but the expectations engendered by these men continue to oppress the young women.

Olga, Masha, and Irina yearn to go to Moscow to take up the life of aristocratic culture for which their father trained them; this illusory prospect deters them from taking decisive action to improve their present circumstances. Lenny, Meg, and Babe suffer as they struggle to fulfill the roles assigned to them by Old Granddaddy's self-serving ambitions for them. Like Don Quixote in Girard's analysis, both sets of sisters desire “according to Another”⁹ rather than choosing for themselves; like the Don, they look painfully foolish in this predicament. Ultimately, sisterly solidarity forms the basis for the MaGraths to break out of “mediated desire” into a more self-directed mode, but the Prozorovs remain imprisoned by their admittedly more seductive legacy of values.

Henley's play makes the mediated nature of the sisters' desire more apparent and more imposed than Chekhov does. Lenny remembers that Old Grandaddy said Zachery “was just the right man for [Babe] whether she knew it now or not” (22).¹⁰ Meg overtly expresses resentment of Old Granddaddy's efforts to direct her life, but Lenny experiences his interference as well-meant:

Meg. … I hate myself when I lie for that old man. I do. I feel so weak. And then I have to go and do at least three or four things that I know he'd despise just to get even with that miserable, old, bossy man!

Lenny. Oh, Meg, please don't talk so about Old Granddaddy! It sounds so ungrateful. Why, he went out of his way to make a home for us, to treat us like we were his very own children. All he ever wanted was the best for us. That's all he ever wanted.

Meg. Well, I guess it was; but sometimes I wonder what we wanted. (69-70)

Chekhov's three sisters are aware of their father's role in creating their values and aspirations, but they do not experience any dissonance about this. Only their brother Andrei has found parental expectation burdensome:

Father—God rest his soul—oppressed us with education. It's ridiculous and stupid, but all the same I must confess that after his death I began to fill out, and now, in one year, I've grown fat, as if a weight had been lifted from my body. Thanks to Father, my sisters and I know French, German, and English, and Irina knows Italian besides. But at what a cost! (248)¹¹

Masha responds that in their provincial setting the knowledge of three languages is “not even a luxury, but a superfluous appendage, like a sixth finger” (249), but she does not reject the appendage. Vershinin, the visiting colonel who had known their father and who will soon become Masha's lover, stipulates that “there is not and cannot be a town so dull and depressing that a clever, educated person would be useless” (249). Hearing this self-validation, Masha reverses her earlier decision to leave Irina's name-day party.

It is essential to the dramatic structure of The Three Sisters that the sisters more consistently experience their patrimony of education and culture as uplifting rather than deforming. The wave of the future, embodied in Natasha Ivanovna, is represented as vulgar, mean-spirited, and even immoral (it is strongly hinted that her second child is her lover's rather than her husband's). As a result, the audience sympathizes with the Prozorovs although it acknowledges that their passive clinging to the past is forlorn and foolish. In contrast, Old Granddaddy's desires have deformed the MaGraths: Lenny believes herself to be sterile and undesirable, Meg has had a brush with insanity, and Babe has been battered by “Mr. Right.”

Unlike the Prozorovs, for whom the beautiful past forms a consolation for the banal present, all the MaGrath sisters' connections to the past are negative or truncated. Meg remembers their father, who walked out on them, as a bastard—“Really, with his white teeth. Daddy was such a bastard” (31).¹² Their mother sank into a depressed silence before she hanged herself and took the pet cat with her. Meg's singing talent has deserted her as she has abandoned her lover, Babe has shot her husband, and Lenny's horse has been struck by lightning. Consequently, the MaGraths have an incentive to look for new directions.

Furthermore, the MaGraths' chief antagonists in the present action embody the ghastly results of enacting Old Granddaddy's value system. On the one hand is Zackery Botrell, the pinnacle of Hazelhurst society, willing to beat, incarcerate, or institutionalize his wife to keep his dominant position. On the other is Cousin Chick, proud possessor of a husband, two children, and a modern home, who sees the sisters' actions not as consequences of a desperate emotional plight but as “trashy ways” that impede her social striving.

Finally, the MaGraths find (as the Prozorovs do not) an ally in their efforts to disrupt the cycle of mediated desire. With a baby face and awkward speech, Barnette Lloyd initially seems like no match for Zackery Botrell, acknowledged as the best lawyer around but not in a position to defend Babe against the charge of attempting to murder him. Although Barnette has just graduated from law school, and Lenny has hired him as a favor to a family friend, he has the shrewdness and drive that the sisters lack. By turning Botrell's effort at blackmail back on him (would Zackery like the citizens of Hazelhurst to see pictures proving his wife found him so inadequate that she had turned to the carnal consolations of a black teenager?), Barnette makes Babe's act of rebellion efficacious. This coup paves the way for Meg and Lenny to assert themselves.

Feminists may, with some justification, object to Henley's introduction of a male savior, particularly one who seems motivated by mediated desire (his “personal vendetta” against Babe's husband concerns some injustice inflicted on Barnette's father). Barnette's intervention only changes the tide of the external action, however; his maneuver sets the stage for Babe's triumph over her most severe internal crisis.

When she shot Zackery, Babe first had intended to kill herself, but then found the courage to redirect her despair toward its proper source, realizing “I wanted to kill him. …’Cause I—I wanted to live!” (49-50). Botrell's threat to commit her to an insane asylum speaks to her deepest fear—that she really is crazy, like her suicidal mother. She is rescued from acting out this fear not by Barnette but by Meg, who convinces her that she is not alone, that she really wants to live and help celebrate Lenny's birthday. Barnette's actions only catalyze a peripeteia that the sisters accomplish for themselves.

This reversal of the MaGrath sisters' fortunes has a preliminary, conditional feeling. Lenny's candlelit vision of the three sisters laughing together “wasn't forever; it wasn't for every minute” (124), and Babe's legal problems are far from over when the curtain falls. Moreover, the more authentic desires toward which the sisters begin to strive remain fairly conventional: Lenny seeks marriage with Charley Hill, and Babe seems on the verge of establishing a relationship with a more suitable lawyer. Meg seems poised for a fresh start, but the play does not resolve the traditional split between a woman's achievement of a successful career and an emotional commitment; she regains her singing voice when she gives up the prospect of stealing Doc away from his wife and children.

Despite remaining bound up in traditional female expectations, the MaGraths' future prospects are considerably more optimistic than the Prozorovs'. In contrast to the vague but promising vision of the future that ends Henley's play, Chekhov's denouement confronts with brutal honesty the gender-related socioeconomic constraints that limit the sisters' claims on the future. The sisters' dream of going to Moscow is compromised not only by their own refined inertia but by their lack of financial control over their destiny.

By mortgaging the family home without his sisters' permission, Andrei traps Olga and Irina in the backwater mode to which he has already committed himself by marrying Natasha and going to work for the contemptible provincial council. Masha, too, has married a small town hack, to whom her loyalty seems as compelled as that of her lover to his suicidal wife. Irina's reluctant acceptance of Tuzenbach's proposal leads her even deeper into the provinces, to a prosaic job in a brickyard that she fatalistically plans to honor even after Tuzenbach's death theoretically sets her free. In default of the husband with whom she would willingly have spent her days at home, Olga achieves the pinnacle of her professional possibilities when she is made directress of the district girls' school, but her earnings only make it possible for her to liberate the family nurse from ending her life in the poorhouse rather than enabling them to begin a new life in Moscow.

In the fiscal powerlessness imposed on them by the gender-biased property laws of their time, Chekhov's three sisters need a male savior but don't get one. Nor does their love for each other form a sufficient basis of support and warmth to overcome the pain and anguish caused by their failure to achieve relationships based on romantic love.¹³ In contrast to the MaGraths, the Prozorovs have neither the incentive nor the means to escape the beautiful prison-house built by their father's values. Ironically, they are evicted by the vulgar and materialistic Natasha, the antithesis to their mediated desires.

Here Chekhov achieves a level of dramatic tension beyond Henley's scope. In Crimes of the Heart, Chick's ambitions are comically belittled, and Old Granddaddy's are shown to be oppressive, but the MaGrath sisters' own values are poorly defined in contrast. Their freedom to choose seems taken as sufficient value in itself. Moreover, these choices are subjected to some of the same comic belittling as Chick's. Babe takes up the saxophone, not a classical instrument; Lenny meets Charley Hill through a lonely hearts club rather than by some more dignified means. Although these outcomes are consistent with the social fabric of the MaGraths' lives, they also create comic distancing between the audience and the presumed protagonists. This strategy makes it difficult to “enter the … female culture of [Henley's] characters and judge their actions from within that world.”¹⁴

Another striking connection between Crimes of the Heart and The Three Sisters is their shared commitment to tragicomic tone. Chekhov firmly believed that “In life, there are no clear-cut consequences or reasons; in it, everything is mixed up together; the important and the paltry, the great and the base, the tragic and the ridiculous.”¹⁵ Henley points out (with the intense personalism that consistently distinguishes her viewpoint from Chekhov's more universalized perspective, exemplified in the reference to all “life,” above) that she doesn't set out to write comedy:

“All these things that I feel inside are desperate and dark and unhappy. Or not unhappy, but searching. Then they come out funny. The way my family dealt with hardships was to see the humor or the ironic point of view in the midst of tragedy. And that's just how my mind works.”¹⁶

Henley's and Chekhov's tragicomic mixtures have antecedents in the comédie larmoyante, but they differ from the French archetype in refusing both sentimental and moralistic closure.¹⁷ No theatrical precedent existed for Irina's reaction to the threats of fire, foreclosure, eviction, and unattainable love by sobbing “I can't remember how to say window or floor in Italian” except in Chekhov's own earlier plays (289). This sublime non sequitur has few dramatic equals until the outburst of hysterical laughter that greets Meg's promise to tell the truth to Old Granddaddy even if it sends him into a coma (99).

Both plays contain examples of a beau geste that turns grotesque: Babe aims for Zackery's heart but instead shoots him in the stomach because her hands are shaking; Tuzenbach dies in a duel with a rival whose claims are rhetorical, not real. Henley, however, uses this device to emphasize comically the difference between the audience's expectations and her characters' actions (as when Babe mixes herself a pitcher of lemonade after she shoots Zackery and even asks him if he wants some), while Chekhov uses it to stress the ironic distance between what his characters hope for and what they achieve (as when Chebutykin, a doctor, copies a cure for hair loss out of a local newspaper).

Henley's deployment of the grotesque initially “allows the spectators to distance themselves from these characters and perhaps even to dismiss [their] challenge to male-defined reality as merely ‘crazy,’”¹⁸ whereas Chekhov's strategy connects audience to character in a moment of rueful recognition. Laughlin, however, sees a polemic method to Henley's flirtation with the madwoman stereotype:

For example, the play clearly connects Babe's “madness” with her rejection of sex role stereotypes and especially the sexual assertiveness demonstrated in her affair with Willie Jay. … While Henley's script leaves itself open to a production which plays up the insanity and presumed irrationality of her central characters, the notion of madness … links Crimes of the Heart with similar devices in an entire tradition of women's writing.¹⁹

A side effect of the tragicomic tone in Henley's and Chekhov's plays is that both require a particular kind of acting ensemble for successful performance. Chekhov's Seagull expired uneventfully in the star-oriented, highly commercial Imperial theater, in reaction to which he became active in developing the Moscow Art Theater as an alternative. The development of regional and off-Broadway venues for plays by women made possible productions of Crimes that did not cater to female stereotypes. It is significant that Crimes won its Pulitzer Prize before its Broadway review, under a policy (first adopted in the year the play appeared) that allowed works from regional as well as New York theaters to be considered for the award. Several critics of the Broadway staging of Crimes felt that the actresses' exaggerated Southernness verged on parody, in contrast to the restraint exercised in the prize-winning Louisville production. As Helene Keyssar observed:

Because the play's texture relies on the characterizations of the three sisters and the dialogue among them, it can only move the audience if the ordinariness of the women is made specific and honest in performance. In the Broadway production, however, each of the actresses parodied her role, exaggerating the “Southernness” of the women, the naïveté of Lenny, the brashness of Babe and the pseudo-urban sophistication of Meg. Laughing at these women is boring and allows a particularly dangerous condescension when the audience's frame is a play by and about women.²⁰

For Henley, as for Chekhov, the tragicomic tone functions as a diagnostic and a healing device. Again, Henley approaches these functions from a personal perspective, while Chekhov's view is other-directed. Chekhov operates with the objectivity of a clinician (“My familiarity with the natural sciences and the scientific method has always kept me on my guard”²¹), tempered by the compassion of a general practitioner (“First of all, I'd get my patients into a laughing mood, and only then would I begin to treat them”²²). Henley thinks like an (im)patient:

Writing always helps me not to feel so angry. I've written about ghastly, black feelings and thoughts that I've had. The hope is that if you can pin down these emotions and express them accurately, you will be somehow absolved. I like to write characters who do horrible things, but whom you can still like … because of their human needs and struggles.²³

The pursuit of objectivity may explain the Darwinian underpinning of the character struggles in Crimes of the Heart and Three Sisters. The passive, exhausted Prozorov sisters identify with the migratory birds that can fly away to more propitious climates although they themselves cannot set forth for Moscow. Their brother Andrei describes the family nemesis, his wife Natasha, as “a small, blind, sort of thick skinned animal” (301); that is, as a mole that has undermined the structure of their household. Which species seems better equipped to survive in the changing social environment depicted by the play?

Early in Crimes of the Heart, the MaGrath sisters are associated with images of extinction and decay (Lenny's horse struck by lightning, the family cat hanged by their suicidal mother, Meg's fascination with the illustrations of skin diseases in Old Granddaddy's medical books), but the balance of power shifts when Lenny sweeps the appropriately named Cousin Chick out of the family kitchen with a broom. Both plays also raise the Lamarckian question of whether acquired characteristics (a culture, a psychosis) determine the behavior of the next generation.

The struggle for survival depicted by Henley and Chekhov takes place on determinedly commonplace grounds. Chekhov described the rationale for the texture of his dramatic realism in this way:

Let the things that happen onstage be just as complex and yet just as simple as they are in life. For instance, people are having a meal at table, just having a meal, but at the same time their happiness is being created, or their lives are being smashed up.²⁴

Nancy Hargrove points out that Henley's realistic details “reinforce the idea that ordinary life is like this”:

Her characters unobtrusively but constantly are doing the mundane things that go on in daily life. … In fact, eating and drinking run all through the plays, not only because they are such ordinary and necessary parts of living but also because, in Henley's universe, they are among the few pleasures of life or, in certain cases, among the few consolations for life.²⁵

Everyday activities serve the cause of characterization, too. The simple act of carrying a candle across the stage identifies Natasha as Lucifer or Lady Macbeth. A game of hearts emblemizes the MaGraths' troubled efforts to achieve sisterly bonding; they can scarcely remember the rules, except that “the Black Sister is the worst,” and the game abruptly breaks up when Meg accepts Doc Porter's invitation. Both playwrights use gift-giving to establish relationships among characters. Chick's present of leftover Christmas chocolates shows how little she really thinks of Lenny, and at the other extreme the silver samovar presented to Irina by Chebutykin indicates that he sees her as an avatar of her dead mother.

Gift-giving participates in a larger context of ritual occasions serving as an ironic counterpoint to the developing dramatic situation. Lenny's thirtieth birthday should be celebrated as a life-giving event, but even such comically offhand remembrances as the leftover chocolates and Lenny's candlelit birthday cookie get swept aside in the aftermath of Babe's attempt to kill her abusive husband. Irina's nameday party, which unpropitiously occurs on the anniversary of her father's death, unwittingly begins her downfall and her sisters', because it provides Andrei the opportunity to propose to the adorably flustered Natasha.

Chekhov gives much fuller scope to this idea than Henley, as successive acts show Natasha's increasingly malevolent ability to kill the Prozorovs' celebratory impulse. In act 2, she preempts the Mardi Gras celebration but goes off herself “for a drive” with her lover Protopopov. The fire in act 3 may be beyond her control, but she so joylessly opposes the domestic hubbub brought about by the sisters' relief efforts that Masha observes, “She goes about looking as if it were she who had started the fire” (290). By the end of the play, she has successfully evicted the sisters from their own home, and she even casts gloom over the farewell party by voicing her plans to cut down the trees in their garden. In this respect, The Three Sisters marks an advance even within Chekhov's oeuvre in the “technique of wringing symbol from apparent naturalism.”²⁶

Keeping a single set for her drama, Henley follows Chekhov in using setting to reveal character and situation in a more limited way. The MaGrath kitchen, the sentimentalized “heart” of a family's home, becomes the site of betrayed confidences that reveal the sisters' mutual isolation; in act 3, however, the sisters' growing solidarity is revealed by their ability to chase the intrusive Chick out of the house. The closing tableau of Crimes, with the sisters laughing and hugging in the glow of birthday candles, echoes in a brighter key the curtain tableau of The Three Sisters farewell embrace.

Henley also provides a natural catastrophe as a metaphor for emotional crisis. She uses the device in less developed form than appears in Three Sisters, in which the fire gives physical immediacy to the tensions and longings that have suffused the emotional atmosphere of the play. She set the time of Crimes of the Heart as “five years after Hurricane Camille,” making both the past event and the elapsed interval significant to the course of present action.

The tropical storm with a woman's name crippled Meg's lover when, with ironic literalness, it made the roof fall in on them. Meg subsequently abandoned Doc, re-enacting her own abandonment by her father in the same spirit of painful self-preservation that in childhood led her to consume double-dip ice cream sundaes while staring at the March of Dimes poster in the drugstore. Half a decade later, Meg has lost her ability to sign and has been driven to the brink of madness by her bad-faith effort to live out Old Granddaddy's vision of her as a Hollywood sensation. In this same time period, Babe has endured the abusive marriage arranged by Old Grandaddy to “skyrocket her to the heights of Hazlehurst society” (22), and Lenny, goaded to despair about her own desirability by Old Granddaddy's constant references to her shrunken ovary, has donned “the lime-green gardening gloves of a dead woman” (34) to assume Old Grandmama's role of self-effacing caregiver. This five-year interval can be seen as the eye of the storm, with Babe's murder attempt ushering in a new phase of turbulence that ultimately clears the air, but Henley does not ground the metaphor this specifically in her writing.

In The Three Sisters, the texture of everyday life acts as a ground for displaying and reversing theatrical conventions. A similar effect appears in Crimes of the Heart, although Henley disclaims this as a conscious intent, and her knowledge of the devices seems to have been absorbed from popular culture rather than theatrical experience.

As early as 1880, Chekhov demonstrated his command of the stock materials of popular theater in a list called “Things Most Frequently Encountered in Novels, Stories and Other Such Things.” Of the twenty-six categories listed, at least ten appear in Three Sisters, including the “baron-neighbour” and the “foreign musician” (Tuzenbach), the “littérateur-liberal” (Solyony), the “doctor with a worried face … And where there is a doctor, there is … care of the wounded in a duel” (Chebutykin), the “servant who has been in service with the old masters, who is prepared to go through thick and thin for the master's family, even go through fire” (Anfisa), “a mortaged estate in the South,” the “height of the skies, the impenetrable, boundless … distance … incomprehensible, in a word: nature!” and such standard props as “Chinese porcelain” (Irina's heirloom clock, shattered by Chebutykin) and “the gun that does not fire.”²⁷

Many of these features appear only to reverse the audience's expectations about them. The Baron does not marry the ingenue and thus rescue the mortgaged estate, the literary type turns out to be a villain, the doctor does not save the duellist when the prop gun is actually fired. Furthermore, the melodramatic crises of the play occur offstage, and the characters seem barely able to grasp them in their aftermath. When Andrei announces that he has mortgaged the girls' patrimony to pay his gambling debts, when Masha confesses that she loves the visiting colonel more than her boring husband, when Chebutykin reveals that Andrei's wife is having an affair with his boss and chief creditor (all these disclosures occurring while the town is burning down around them), the sisters don't even want to hear about it. Irina's fiancé is killed, Masha's lover departs with his regiment, the sisters are turned out of their own home, but the only resolution offered to these disasters is Olga's curtain line, “If we only knew, if we only knew!” (312).

To a certain extent, the characters in Crimes of the Heart present themselves as Southern Gothic stereotypes: Lenny the neurasthenic old maid, Meg the sultry temptress, Babe the slow-witted child-wife, Zackery the slick and Barnette the hayseed version of the rural lawyer, Old Grandaddy the fierce patriarch. The thread of grotesquerie epitomized by the mother hanging her cat along with herself is also a southern Gothic staple.

The play's resolution refutes these stereotypes, however, as Lenny makes a date with her mail-order beau, Meg learns that she can love Doc without possessing him, Babe escapes Zackery's malign influence and commences a healthier relationship with Barnette, who shrewdly uses Zackery's macho to neutralize his efforts to imprison or institutionalize his wife. Even the hanging of the cat is transformed from eccentricity to poignantly motivated action.

Henley incorporated southern Gothic motifs into Crimes intuitively rather than in polemic with a system of conventions:

Well, I didn't, consciously like say that I was going to be like Southern Gothic or grotesque. I just write things that are interesting to me. I guess maybe that's just inbred in the South. You hear people tell stories, and somehow they are always more vivid and violent than the stories people tell out in Los Angeles.²⁸

She had not even read Flannery O'Connor until one of her early reviews pointed out a similarity in the two writers' styles. Perhaps this is why she is less adept at exposing and dramatically manipulating stock expectations than Chekhov. Consequently, some critics experienced the texture of Crimes as unrealistic and clichéd:

Henley's play … is like a tall tale. You don't believe a minute of it but you do want to know what happens next. … her characters never rise above cliché and the story, though funny, never seems true.²⁹

Others, meanwhile, treated Henley's “pure vein of Southern Gothic humor” as a specialized form of realism rather than as a system of conventions:

The playwright gets her laughs not because she tells sick jokes, but because she refuses to tell jokes at all. Her characters always stick to the unvarnished truth, at any price … the heightening is not achieved at the price of credibility.³⁰

This unstable mixture of elements has proved a difficult challenge for directors. Henley notes that despite Crimes's victory in The Actors Theater of Louisville's Festival of New American Plays, it was then “turned down all over town. I guess it's not an easy play for people to pick up the tone of—to know whether it's funny or sad.”³¹ Reviewers of the Broadway production were divided in their opinions (in the same week that The Christian Science Monitor called it “a perversely antic stage piece” that demonstrates “there is sometimes no accounting for awards,” the New York Post hailed Crimes as “A prize hit that's all heart”)³² and could have refereed their differences by reference to the Chekhovian precedent. Chekhov's leading actress (later his wife) Olga Knipper and his leading director Konstantin Stanislavsky recalled that at the Moscow Art Theater's first formal reading of Three Sisters not only did nobody laugh, but several listeners shed tears. In the face of this reaction, Chekhov repeatedly muttered, “But what I wrote was a vaudeville!”³³ Clive Barnes may have captured best the volatile spirit of Henley's and Chekhov's tragicomedy when he noted that:

Those Greeks had it absolutely right when they made their theatrical symbolic masks of tragedy and comedy identical except for the mouth. For so often, comedy is merely a tragedy that is happening to someone else.³⁴

Some feminist critics object to the comic emphasis of Crimes of the Heart because it undermines the possibility of constructively changing the social relations it satirizes. As Helene Keyssar puts it:

A common and not trivial attribute of these plays is their ability to make audiences laugh; each of these playwrights has a skill with dialogue and an eye for the absurd in ordinary life that make somber topics palatable and engaging. The weakness common to these plays is inherent in their particular strengths: no matter how serious the topic, they are all comedies of manners, revelations of the surfaces of sexual identity and sexism; they are not challenges to the deeper social structures that allow those manners to endure.³⁵

Susan L. Carlson traces this difficulty not to particular dramatists but to comedy as a genre:

In the upheaval of comedy's role reversals, women acquire a dominance they normally do not possess. We can laugh at that novel power as we laugh at the other role reversals and inversions of comedy because we are also assured by comedy that this world out of order will be—by the end of the play—comfortably set back in order. …

For no matter how revolutionary a comedy may be, no matter how strong its women, no matter how battered its sexist double standard, no matter how ironic the happy ending, comedy as we know it can in the end only reflect the society it portrays. Its structure grows out of an old society, never the new one it may propose.³⁶

Some of the aspects of comedy that trouble feminist critics may concern the economic constraints of commercial theater production. Asked if she felt that there is still discrimination against women playwrights in the American theater, Henley replied:

Yes, I think there is. Simply because there are still a lot more men than women in charge of our theaters: producing, directing, managing, fund raising. That's where the power and the money are in this country. Men generally can't help but be more moved by a man's play because they relate to it in a personal way. Women are more used to identifying with men, because they're raised on it, they've got to be … In terms of the people who make decisions about play production, the closer these dreams are to their version of themselves, the more chance they'll want to sit through a play or to find money to produce it.³⁷

An additional problem arises from the necessity for plays to compete with other commercial media. Pam Gems, a British dramatist whose works are often contrasted to those of American mainstream women playwrights for their ability to bring feminist issues more assertively to the stage, presents the issue this way:

Seriously, we do have a problem, not only because other people can stay at home … switch channels … but because whole generations are growing up accustomed to the quick elision of the visual mode … the quick transitions of movies and television. We have to elide. But a serious play is working at depth. So it ain't easy.³⁸

Whatever causes might account for the emphasis on comedy in Henley's tragicomic mixture, comparison with Chekhov on this point suggests that depth need not be sacrificed to laughter in the work of a mature playwright. Chekhov's one-act comedies and even an early full-length play, Ivanov, shared some of the limitations of Henley's writing. They emphasized plot over character development and lacked the lyricism that in Chekhov's later dramas provides a poignant counterpoint to the banal lives depicted on the stage. His three sisters, on the other hand, “create images to embody their sense of an ideal life,”³⁹ and in general his later plays juxtapose poverty of circumstances with richness of metaphor. Moreover, Chekhov (with the essential cooperation of the Moscow Art Theater) was able to find a paying audience for his lyrical comedies at a time when Stanislavsky characterized the commercial theater as “controlled by restaurateurs on the one hand, and by bureaucrats on the others.”⁴⁰

At this point in her development as a playwright, Henley yearns for lyricism but does not feel confident of her ability to produce it. She worries about “what the world is going to be like when people won't talk anymore … because their minds are absorbed with electronic images” and contrasts that future with a turn-of-the-century past when even small town newspapers “use big words and twists of phrases that are poetic and much more literate than newspapers today,” concluding, “I'm astounded when I think of what a dive we've taken in such a short time.”⁴¹ On the other hand, she hasn't tried prose or poetry because “I don't know if I could do them … I still don't have good grammar for putting like a whole novel or whole story together. I can just write dialogue.”⁴²

Although she's naive in reducing the problem to lacking good grammar, Henley puts her finger on the central weakness of her dramatic style when she says she just writes dialogue. Chekhov's dramaturgy may err on the side of prosiness—how is it possible to stage Chekhov's direction in Uncle Vanya that the map of Africa is “of no use to anyone here”? But at its best, Chekhov's dramatic writing combines the implicative power of narrative with the spontaneity of the spoken word in a way that Henley might learn to emulate.

When May Sarton went to see the film version of Crimes of the Heart, she recorded in her journal:

I was a little disappointed in the text, written by the author of the play which was on Broadway last year … The clamor of voices for one thing, like sharp bird voices, put me on edge. It made me long for Chekhov, for something subtler, less obviously dramatic—but in these days no doubt there would be no audience if it were Chekhov.⁴³

Sarton here implies that Henley is the Chekhov the present generation deserves. This judgment seems unduly stringent toward both the playwright and her public.

Henley's “clamor of voices” builds toward “a vision of feminine assertiveness and female bonding as an alternative to self-destruction,”⁴⁴ which Chekhov's soft-spoken protagonists cannot begin to imagine. Less subtle but more dynamic than Chekhov's infinitely nuanced social milieu, the one depicted by Henley seems more susceptible to beneficial change. This prospect of transformation makes Crimes of the Heart more accessible to contemporary audiences for whom the dramatic representation of life's unresolved texture produces the ache of familiarity rather than the sting of novelty. Sarton's bird metaphor, critical in its context, has a more positive aspect; while Chekhov's three sisters elegiacally celebrate the freedom of the migratory birds, Henley's help each other escape from the cage.

Notes

1. John Griffin Jones, “Beth Henley,” in Mississippi Writers Talking: Interviews with Eudora Welty, Shelby Foote, Elizabeth Spencer, Barry Hannah, Beth Henley, ed. John Griffin Jones (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1982), p. 180.

2. Ibid., pp. 181-82.

3. Ibid., p 184.

4. Nicholas Moravĉevich, “Women in Chekhov's Plays,” in Chekhov's Great Plays: A Critical Anthology, ed. Jean-Pierre Barricelli (New York: New York University Press, 1981), p. 206. Moravĉevich here speaks specifically of Irina, but the criticism seems fairly applied to all the sisters.

5. Don Nelson, “Crimes is Heartwarming,” New York Daily News, 5 November 1981, points out that:

   Even the frivolity makes a point. There is enough hugging and squealing and jumping about among the MaGraths to recall with dismay a host of sorority films; but these frolics do reveal an immaturity which is almost crippling.

6. Nancy D. Hargrove, “The Tragicomic Vision of Beth Henley's Drama,” Southern Quarterly 2, no. 4 (Summer 1984): 54-70. Hargrove notes this pattern in Crimes of the Heart, but it occurs frequently in Three Sisters as well. Chekhov even has a scene in which one character eats up all of somebody else's chocolates!

7. Harai Golomb, “Music as Theme and as Structural Model in Chekhov's Three Sisters,” in Semiotics of Drama and Theater: New Perspectives in the Theory of Drama and Theatre, ed. Herta Schmid and Aloysius Van Kesteren (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1984), p. 175.

8. Kathleen Betsko and Rachel Koenig, Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights (New York: Beech Tree Books, 1987), p. 218.

9. René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero, quoted by Karen L. Laughlin, “Criminality, Desire and Community: A Feminist Approach to Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart,” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, no. 5 (1986), p. 38.

10. Beth Henley, Crimes of the Heart (New York: Viking Press, 1982). Subsequent references are cited parenthetically by page number.

11. Anton Chekhov, The Three Sisters, in Chekhov: The Major Plays, trans. Ann Dunnigan (New York: Signet, 1964). Subsequent references are cited parenthetically by page number.

12. Is the “big teeth” description a reference to the absent Daddy as a Big Bad Wolf?

13. Hargrove, “The Tragicomic Vision of Beth Henley's Drama,” identifies this theme as “typical of Henley's realistic and uncompromising vision” (p. 61).

14. Helene Keyssar, Feminist Theatre: An Introduction to Plays of Contemporary British and American Women (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 26.

15. Anton Chekhov, as reported by Alexander Kuprin, quoted in Vera Gottlieb, Chekhov and the Vaudeville: A Study of Chekhov's One-Act Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 1.

16. Betsko and Koenig, Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights, p. 216.

17. Gottlieb, Chekhov and the Vaudeville, p. 39.

18. Laughlin, “Criminality, Desire, and Community,” p. 46.

19. Ibid., p. 47.

20. Keyssar, Feminist Theatre, p. 158.

21. Chekhov, letter responding to request from Gregory Rossolimo (1899), quoted in Gottlieb, Chekhov and the Vaudeville, p. 10.

22. Chekhov, letter to Nikolai Leykin (1884), quoted in Gottlieb, Chekhov and the Vaudeville, p. 11.

23. Betsko and Koenig, Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights, p. 215.

24. Chekhov, quoted in Robert Brustein's foreword to Chekhov: The Major Plays, trans. Ann Dunnigan (New York: Signet, 1964), p. x.

25. Hargrove, “The Tragicomic Vision of Beth Henley's Drama,” p. 64.

26. Richard Peace, Chekhov: A Study of the Four Major Plays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 75.

27. Anton Chekhov, “Things Most Frequently Encountered in Novels, Stories and Other Such Things” (1880), quoted in Gottlieb, Chekhov and the Vaudeville, p. 17.

28. Jones, “Beth Henley,” p. 182.

29. Howard Kissel, Women's Wear Daily, 6 November 1981, in New York Theatre Critics' Reviews 1981, p. 140.

30. Frank Rich, “Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart,” New York Times, 5 November 1981, in New York Theatre Critics' Reviews 1981, p. 136.

31. Interview with Robert Berkvist, “Act I: the Pulitzer, Act II: Broadway,” New York Times, 25 October 1981, pp. 4, 22.

32. John Beaufort, “A Play That Proves There's No Explaining Awards,” The Christian Science Monitor, 9 November 1981, in New York Theatre Critics' Reviews 1981, p. 137.

33. Quoted in Maurice Valency, “Vershinin,” in Chekhov's Great Plays: A Critical Anthology, ed. Jean-Pierre Barricelli (New York: New York University Press, 1981), p. 220.

34. Clive Barnes, “Crime is a Prize Hit That's All Heart,” New York Post 5 November 1981, in New York Theatre Critics' Reviews 1981, p. 138.

35. Keyssar, Feminist Theatre, p. 150. Other “hit shows” by and about women that Keyssar criticizes along with Crimes for staying on “relatively safe terrain” include Mary O'Malley's Once a Catholic, Wendy Wasserstein's Uncommon Women and Others, and Marsha Norman's 'night, Mother.

36. Susan L. Carlson, “Women in Comedy: Problem, Promise, Paradox,” in Drama, Sex and Politics, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 159-60.

37. Betsko and Koenig, Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights, p. 221.

38. Ibid., p. 206.

39. Beverly Hahn, “Three Sisters,” in Chekhov: New Perspectives, ed. Rene and Nonna D. Wellek (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1984), p. 142.

40. L. Shestov, Anton Tchekhov and Other Essays, quoted in Gottlieb, Chekhov and the Vaudeville, p. 14.

41. Betsko and Koenig, Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights, pp. 219-20.

42. Jones, “Beth Henley,” pp. 172-73.

43. May Sarton, After the Stroke: A Journal (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), p. 252.

44. Laughlin, “Criminality, Desire, and Community,” p. 35.