The Playwright and the Play
The Playwright and the Play
Beth Henley, born in 1952 in Jackson, Mississippi, studied acting and theater arts while an undergraduate at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas (TX). Throughout her career in performing arts, she has applied her talents to scriptwriting for theatrical productions and screenplays for films. Her first and probably most famous play is Crimes of the Heart, written in 1978. Other plays written by Henley throughout the ensuing years include: The Wake of Jenny Foster, presented on Broadway in 1982; The Miss Firecracker Contest (1980), produced at the Manhattan Theatre Club in 1984; Impossible Marriage, which premiered Off-Broadway in 1998; and The Jacksonian, which premiered in 2012 at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles and enjoyed a virtual revival in New York, presented during 2020-2021.
Crimes of the Heart, widely-acclaimed, has captivated audiences for more than four decades. The play, whose action is set in 1974 in a small provincial town in Mississippi, became an overnight sensation at the annual festival of New American Plays (1979) in Louisville, Kentucky. In 1980, it was produced Off-Broadway at the Manhattan Theatre Club for a six-week sold-out engagement, then transferred to Broadway in November of 1981, having been awarded the Pulitzer Prize earlier that year. The hugely successful Broadway production ran for 535 performances at the John Golden Theatre, nabbing the New York Drama Critics Award, a Guggenheim Award, and a Tony nomination for Best Play. The film adaptation (1986) featured Jessica Lange, Diane Keaton, and Sissy Spacek.
Crimes of the Heart has become one of the most often revived American plays of the last half century.
YAGA BRADY (Director) - Productions directed at The Stagecrafters include, among others: Witness for the Prosecution; Much Ado About Nothing; Come Back, Little Sheba; Shakespeare in Hollywood; Trouble in Mind; The Golden Coach; The Importance of Being Earnest; The Visit; Mirandolina (The Mistress of the Inn); The Deadly Game; The Night of the Iguana; The Matchmaker; The Dresser; The Little Foxes; The Triumph of Love; Ladies in Retirement; Dial ‘M’ for Murder; Sly Fox; The Cherry Orchard (in her own translation from the Russian original); also several staged readings in our “Reader’s Theater” series: Speed-the-Plow; Taking Sides; Dex & Julie Sittin’ in a Tree. Other activities at this theater: Multiple times on the Board of Directors; Vice President in charge of theatrical productions (2013-2019); Long-standing position as Casting Coordinator; Production manager for multiple shows.
A large part of Yaga’s mission throughout the years has been to introduce to our audiences important English language and foreign classics. She says that she loves to work with "... period pieces, re-read them and rediscover in them issues, questions, lines, references, which, in the re-visiting, make perfect sense within a contemporary perception of the world.”