The Play

Interview with Beth Henley
Conducted by McCarter Literary Intern Emilia LaPenta on January 24, 2011 

Emilia LaPenta: I wanted to start by asking you about your relationship with McCarter and how and when that began?

Beth Henley: Well, actually it began with [former McCarter Dramaturg] Janice Paran. I was in New York, Family Weekend had opened, it was about ten, maybe eleven years ago, and she came to talk to me about doing a commission for McCarter. It was just such a great time, because I’d been knocked down by the critics and my play only ran a week, so I was actually thinking, “They’re really brave to go on and offer me this now!” So, I started working on a play called Ridiculous Fraud. It took me a long time to write it, it seems like.  I went a couple of times to the Writers’ Retreat, which is great. Emily was very generous. I had at least two readings there to try to get the play sorted out before they produced it.

EL: What is it like, now, having us produce Crimes of the Heart, which must receive so many productions in a year? What does it mean to have McCarter do a production of this play now?

BH: Well, I’m just thrilled. I don’t feel very close to many theaters, but McCarter I really feel a kinship with, so I’m just so pleased that they picked my play. It sounds like it’s going to be a great production.

EL: The three women in your play seem so young when you read the play, and you were quite young when you wrote it. Has your relationship with the characters in your play changed in the thirty years since you wrote it?

BH: Well, it’s so funny because they did not seem young to me when I wrote it. Thirty really did seem like, her life is over! I think I have more perspective on their youth. I think the play has a hope to it, because they’re young. Although they’re dealing with some real ghosts and heartbreak, they’re young enough, they have the resilience to have great lives. Or good lives, or to have true lives.

EL: There seems to me to be something eternal about sibling relationships. That idea that you (or I, at least) revert back to a twelve-year-old self when around siblings. In your opinion, are sibling relationships something that shift or remain the same over time?

BH: That’s interesting. I was just over at a friend’s house for dinner and the father was saying his daughter who came back from college, who’s 26, is upset because he didn’t fix her coffee. When I’m with my brothers and sisters it all comes back to the same thing. I think that’s true and not true. When you grow up with these people, the heartbreak that life gives you is sort of transforming in and of itself. You see these people and they stole your doll or you stole their doll, but you’ve seen some of the realities of life that they’ve gone through and you’ve gone through with them, and I think it does change. I mean, it has for me.

EL: Changed in what way? What are some of the positive changes that have come out of that time?

BH: I think a positive change is you lose hope that it will change, and once you’re there, then it’s kind of like, you’re a little more relaxed and present. You’re not straining.

EL: I’ve had the opportunity to see plays with many female protagonists. I think of Lisa Kron’s Well and Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice, and others that feature women, but I know this isn’t always the case and certainly wasn’t the case when Crimes was first produced. I wonder what drew you to writing about three sisters and why having three female leads was important to you.

BH: I think there were fewer women playwrights, fewer women directors and producers, there were not as many parts for women and I just, I have four sisters. It’s autobiographical in some sort of subliminal, spiritual way, because I do come from Mississippi, and that’s just what interested me. What happens when something goes terribly awry and the family’s already been kicked in the face? Now they’ve got to deal with somebody having shot their husband. And the idea that all of them are not close, they all have big secrets from each other, but I think by the end of the play there’s at least a note of mercy and honesty.

EL: I wonder if you have any thoughts about having this play produced now and the importance of McCarter choosing a piece that centers around female protagonists. Is that something that has taken on new meaning for you?

BH: One thing that I think is great that the play does, is give women actresses the opportunity to show their skills. You have to be a comedian and you have to be able to do something dramatic to make this play work. And it’s three women. All the parts are good. I always feel like that is wonderful. Looking back, to me, at the time I wrote it, people would say, “Are you a feminist?” and I was kind of perplexed by the question. But now I see it as very much a play of its time in such a specific way that it, perhaps, it is more universal. Because it is very much about women in a rage. It takes place in 1974, right at the cusp of the women’s liberation movement. But when you’re in the South, you don’t have that to hold on to, so you end up shooting your husband. They take their anger out in other ways. I mean, they’re trying to get liberty back from Old Granddaddy. Trying to sing and get a life that is creative. So looking back on it, I find that kind of surprising—“Wow, it really is a feminist play!”

EL: Was the setting then something you started with when you were writing, or something that came afterwards after a lot of the story had developed?

BH: Well, I started it to take place in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, which is a town of 3,000 in southern Mississippi, which is where my grandparents lived, my father’s parents, so I knew the town so to speak. I liked the idea of how really small it was, and so everyone knew everyone’s business so easily and there were social codes that were pretty engrained. And I started thinking, my grandfather got lost in the woods once, his horse came back without him. And they sent helicopters and everyone came home from college and searched for him and finally he was found. But when I originally thought about writing the play I thought, “I want to write about something where tragedy happens that brings everyone back.” Not back for a holiday or something good, they’re coming back for something tragic or potentially tragic. But then, as I was writing it I thought, “Uh, I think it would better if…” I don’t know, that just got lost. He got put in the hospital.

EL: A lot of the writing about you talks about you as a Southern writer and about you being from Mississippi. I wonder how you think this region has affected or inspired you?

BH: Oh, I definitely think it’s affected me, in many ways, because that’s what you’re exposed to when you don’t have the perspective to know there may be other worlds, may be other sort of universes that are different. I mean, actually my most recent play, The Jacksonian, takes place in Jackson, Mississippi and it takes place in 1964—it’s sort of a place I keep going back to. That I’m haunted by.

EL: As someone who’s labeled as a Southern writer, do you think there are characteristics of Southern writing that you feel particularly connected to?

BH: I guess the storytelling aspect, just enjoying hearing a good story told well. And language. I mean the South, they always say people talk a little bit longer because you’re sitting out on the porch. It’s warm, as opposed to, it’s freezing up North and you can’t really talk. There was something languid about the language when I was growing up.

EL: Also, I wonder about the Southern sense of humor, the darkness, this worldview of seeing tragic events through a humorous lens. Is this something you think is connected to your experience with these stories from the South? Or an aspect of growing up in your family?

BH: I think there was some sort of definite underbelly of: your pain is not precious, just get on with it, or make a joke of it. There’s a sense of irony: don’t take yourself too seriously, don’t get dramatic. I don’t know if that comes from the Civil War, from having lost and facing the humiliation, you kind of can’t look at tragic things head on? I’ve found the way to survive them is to sneak under them, over them. People in the South can present their pain but not make it a burden on others.

EL: You’ve lived in California for quite a long time now, haven’t you? What does the Southern identity mean to you now, living in a different part of the country? Is it still something you feel connected to?

BH: I do. I love to go back to the South. I’m a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, which is mainly novelists and poets, and also I went to Sewanee to teach this summer. I like to go back to the South. Actually, I just like to be around people who are writers and poets. As opposed to, I don’t know, playwrights. It’s nice to be around other people who are working in different ways.

EL: I have one more question. I was reading the other day the interview you did for Ridiculous Fraud and you mentioned in that interview: “It’s funny how you write plays, they can be ahead of you.” I wonder if there’s a lesson that you’ve come across since writing Crimes that perhaps the characters haven’t yet learned? Or something from the play that you’ve come to appreciate more now that you’re able to look back on it?

BH: Well, what I meant to say is the play is prescient. Sometimes the play knows more than you do. And I think, in the sense of Crimes, that play at least knew the direction to take your life in was toward connection. I’m not sure that I knew that, or that I even know that now. And Ridiculous Fraud, it kept, the last scene I knew was in a graveyard and their mother died, and then my mother died when I was halfway through the play. I mean, the strangest things like that have happened.