I hate reading plays. I HATE IT. We don’t expect people to have great literary experiences reading movies scripts, but we do with plays. I do reading challenges every year (this one is for Reading Women) for the express purpose of making my reading more diverse so I’m not going to let plays defeat me is poetry hasn’t in years past. But I did no enjoy a single minute of it.
I’m still rating this three stars because it isn’t the play’s fault I’m not the right reader.
Crimes of the Heart is a drama in three acts that won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1981 (see – I’m likely the problem here, it was also nominated for the Tony in 1982 and turned into a movie in 1986 that I’m pretty sure I’ve seen). It is set in a small town of Hazelhurst, Mississippi, and scrutinizes the lives of three sisters who have gathered at home to deal with fallout of their lives. Over the course of the play (about two days) the sisters unearth grudges, criticize each other, reminisce about their family life, and attempt to understand their mother’s suicide years earlier.
Henley created three strong, yet emotional unstable characters in Lenny, Meg, and Babe. Each sister has faced her share of hardships during her life, specifically their mother’s suicide from which none has completely recovered twenty years later. Coping in their own way by becoming a caregiver, running away, or marrying the town bigwig, each sister deals with the loss of their parents uniquely, but they learn that its easier faced together. I just wish that I cared while reading.