"I Go with What I'm Feeling"

By RICHARD CORLISS

Playwright Beth Henley, 29, parlays down-home truths into hits

Sugar and spice and every known vice--that's what Beth Henley's plays are made of. The Delta ladies who inhabit Henley's comic universe can be found a few miles south of Jackson, Miss., and just this side of Bananas. There is Babe Botrelle, whose Crimes of the Heart are to shoot her piggish husband (because "I just didn't like his looks") and to keep close company with a 15-year-old black boy. Popeye Jackson, from The Miss Firecracker Contest, knits tiny jumpsuits for frogs and "can hear voices through my eyes" ever since her brother put ear drops in them. Am I Blue's Ashbe Williams is a wildly romantic teen-ager with a propensity for stringing Cheerios on a shoelace, then eating them. Pixrose Wilson, the ethereal urchin who attends The Wake of Jamey Foster, dreams of having a baby: half human, half sheep. Are they weird? Naaah, they are the most engaging bunch of eccentrics since the days of the young William Saroyan. Spend an evening with the Henley sorority and you will have the time of your life.

Audiences are doing just that, and critics too. Crimes of the Heart, Henley's first full-length play, brought her a Broadway hit and a Pulitzer Prize--she keeps the certificate in a desk drawer. Out of another drawer came Am I Blue, a one-acter she wrote as a sophomore at Southern Methodist University; it recently opened at Manhattan's Circle Repertory Company. The Miss Firecracker Contest, her second full-length play, has completed a successful run at Buffalo's Studio Arena Theater; and her latest, strongest play, The Wake of Jamey Foster, is charming theatergoers at the Hartford Stage Company. Crimes of the Heart will be filmed by Jonathan Demme (Melvin and Howard), and an original Henley screenplay, The Moon Watcher, is scheduled for production later this year. At 29, this soft-spoken sprite from Jackson has more hits percolating than Neil Simon put together.

"Her plays have a sense of place and character," says Ulu Grosbard, director of Jamey Foster, "a unity of vision and a sharp eye for the contradictions within human beings." Jon Jory, whose Actors Theater of Louisville first produced Crimes of the Heart, is pleased that "Beth writes people rather than plots. She's writing what she knows. She imbibed the Southern gothic sensibility with her mother's milk." Evelyn Purcell, who will direct The Moon Watcher, is a kindred spirit; her documentary film Rush, about student bodies at Ole Miss, is a cartographer's view of Henleyland. Says Purcell: "It's because she writes for herself that her plays come out so true. What we're seeing is her vision, pure and simple."

Pure for sure, but deceptively simple. Each of her plays pries the audience's eyes open with an outrageous act, then makes them crinkle with laughter and moisten, just a bit, as Henley's daffy women reveal their desires and fears with slumber-party bravado. By the end of the evening, caricatures have been fleshed into characters, jokes into down-home truths, domestic atrocities into strategies for staying alive. Not bad for a young woman who, until three years ago, was eking out her stalled career as a Los Angeles actress by sitting at her kitchen table and dreaming of folks back home--in her vivid memory and vital imagination.

If Beth Henley the person had not existed, Beth Henley the playwright might have invented her. Beneath that quiet exterior, there is the same flamboyance of spirit, the same belief that a crazy quilt of sweet dreams and common sense will somehow keep you warm through the night. Beth's father was a lawyer from Hazlehurst, Miss, (the scene of Crimes), her mother an amateur actress from down the road in Brookhaven (where Firecracker is set). "I was real shy when I was little," Henley says in a molasses drawl just slightly diluted by her years in Los Angeles. "I was sick with asthma. Spent a lot of time getting shots and laying in bed. At night, Mama'd come into my room and ask me why I was crying. I'd tell her I was pretending to be Heidi."

She grew more rambunctious in high school--"spraying my hair orange and getting thrown out of movie theaters"--and then, as an acting major at S.M.U., discovered classical drama. Reading Chekhov, Beckett, Shaw and King Lear, "the veils of the mind lifted," she says. "This was alive theater, someone bringing you in touch with a world you hadn't understood before." Once in Los Angeles, she began writing, "almost for pure sanity's sake. I'm like a child when I write, taking chances, never thinking in terms of logic or reviews. I just go with what I'm feeling. And I get obsessed: I'm always afraid I'm going to die before I complete it. I work from day into darkest night and morning. I've found that in the hours of darkest doom, there will soon be light--so I don't give up. It's then that my subconscious is about to give me an answer."

Henley still lives in West Hollywood, in a rented house unrefurnished by success, with Actor Stephen Tobolowsky, who played a dog sweeper in Firecracker and a turkey jerker in Jamey Foster. Last year she herself appeared as a bag lady in a radical farce at Los Angeles' Odyssey Theater: "It keeps my childlike spirit alive to go out and do something really strange." When her schedule permits, she attends boxing matches at the Olympic Auditorium, goes to Dodger games or listens to jazz at the Parisian Room. And she still goes home to Jackson, though "it's different now. People who used to talk freely don't talk any more, figuring they'll end up in a play or a book." They need not worry. Beth Henley is no folklorist with a tape recorder. Her characters are part observation, part parody, all artistic alchemy.

What will be left when Beth Henley turns 30? Movie acting, yes: "I can only defend my feelings about theater by experiencing film." Directing, no: "I've got such weird taste and I'm given to such excesses that my ideas would have to be curbed." How much of the good life does she want right now? "I'd like to join a Nautilus program. And stay at the Plaza Hotel at Christmas. And eat out. And order champagne. And learn to sail." Sailing can wait. On her talent and fame, Beth Henley is already soaring.

--By Richard Corliss.

Reported by Elaine Dutka/New York

With reporting by Elaine Dutka/New York

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