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THE STORY: The scene is Hazlehurst, Mississippi, where the three Magrath sisters have gathered to await news of the family patriarch, their grandfather, who is living out his last hours in the local hospital. Lenny, the oldest sister, is unmarried
THE STORY: This stunning comic drama, set in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, begins the morning of Teddy Parker's debutante ball, that archetypal phenomenon in Southern culture known as a maiden's coming out. Teddy's mother, the beautiful and formidabl
Beth Henley's twelve complete plays (three of which have been turned into films) have achieved worldwide production. At age 29, she produced her first full-length drama, Crimes of the Heart, which won a Pulitzer Prize and garnered three Academy Award nominations as a film. Her Mississippi upbringing and her penchant for the eccentricities of southern culture, however, have caused critics to categorize her writing as a kind of southern gothic folklore inspired by feminist ideology. This book, the first critical study of Henley's complete plays, attempts to dispel the common stereotypes that associate Henley's work with regional drama and sociological treatises. It argues instead that Henley can best be perceived as a dramatist who delineates an existential despair manifested in various forms of what Freud calls the modern neurosis. The book maintains that Henley's plays must be understood as universal statements about the angst of modern civilization, and Henley's characters are assessed in light of Freud's proposition that cultural restrictions create neurotic individuals. The introduction provides a brief account of Henley's childhood and career. Early chapters summarize the theory of the modern angoisse espoused in Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, while later chapters relate this theory to thematic and stylistic elements of Henley's most popular play, Crimes of the Heart, as well as Am I Blue, The Wake of Jamie Foster, The Miss Firecracker Contest, The Debutante Ball, The Lucky Spot, Abundance, Signature, Control Freaks, Revelers, L-Play, and Impossible Marriage.
THE STORY: Bess Johnson and Macon Hill are mail-order brides who meet while waiting for their husbands to pick them up to start life in a small town in the Wyoming Territory in the 1860s. Bess is a romantic while Macon Hill is exuberant and determi
Jackson, Mississippi, 1964. When his wife kicks him out, respectable dentist Bill Perch moves into the seedy Jacksonian Motel. There, his downward spiral is punctuated by encounters with his teenage daughter, a gold-digging motel employee, a treacherous bartender, and his now-estranged wife. Revolving around the night of a murder, THE JACKSONIAN brims with suspense and dark humor and unearths the eerie tensions and madness in a town poisoned by racism.
THE STORY: The place is Pigeon, Louisiana, the time Christmas 1934--at the low point of the American Depression. Reed Hooker, a compulsive gambler, has won a rundown rural dance hall in a poker game, and hopes that it will make his fortune. Assisted
Author : Robert J. Andreach Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press Page : 220 pages File Size : 53,7 Mb Release : 2006 Category : Drama ISBN : 157003639X
Understanding Beth Henley by Robert J. Andreach Pdf
Beth Henley remains best known for 'Crimes of the Heart', a play that won the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and later was made into a major motion picture. This introduction to the Mississippi-born playwright and her body of work presents Henley's plays as a unified whole.
THE STORIES: CONTROL FREAKS. Sister Willard (a troubled woman who struggles with three personalities: Sister, Spaghetti and Pinkie) returns from jury duty to discover her brother, Carl, has married Betty. Carl and Betty have big plans to open up Fu
The West. The 1920s. Mabel’s had a hard few weeks. A dynamite accident at a gold mine has left her wealthy but orphaned; she’s shipped off to a calculating aunt, whose nephew is charged with seducing her to control Mabel’s fortune. This hapless courtship reveals a shared love of silent movies and a plan for greater things. A story of mishaps and moxie, the romance of Hollywood and ultimately a Hollywood-caliber romance. A slapstick comedy from the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Crimes of the Heart.
In The Jacksonian, Beth Henley returns to the Southern Gothic storytelling that made her reputation with both critics and audiences. Set in a seedy motel in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1964, the play centers around Rosy, a troubled teenager, and Bill, her dentist father who has been living at the motel for several months as his wife, Susan, considers the disgrace of divorce. Fred, the motel bartender, and Eva, a waitress, are locked in a gruesome pact: he’ll marry her if she agrees to help him evade punishment for a hideous crime. But Bill, turning to nitrous oxide to ease the pain of his life collapsing around him, is a convenient target for Eva’s desperate desire for companionship. At the height of the violence associated with the civil rights movement, these characters gradually reveal the shameful secrets and psychological turmoil just beneath the surface of their insistent Southern gentility.
Beth Henley was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Drama and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play for her first full-length play, Crimes of the Heart, yet there has been no book-length consideration of her body of work until now. This volume includes original essays that contextualize and analyze her works from a variety of perspectives, focusing on her vexed status as a southern writer, her use of the comic grotesque, and her alleged feminist critiques of modern society. Receiving special attention are lesser-known plays which are crucial to understanding Henley's development as a playwright and postmodern thinker.
THE STORY: The place is the small Mississippi town of Brookhaven, the time a few days before the Fourth of July. Carnelle Scott (known locally as Miss Hot Tamale) is rehearsing furiously for the Miss Firecracker Contest--hoping that a victory will
These four plays by one of American theatre's most celebrated writers are populated by people who lead lives of distinctly unquiet desperation. The plays are: The Lucky Spot, The Miss Firecracker Contest, The Wake of Jamey Foster, and Abundance.
