Southern Charm: The “Heart” Of The Theater World Returns

It’s a play after our collective heart.

What gives “Crimes of the Heart” staying power is its reminder that family drama and trauma are so often carried into adulthood.

After their father abandons their small-town Mississippi family, triggering their mother’s suicide (she takes the family cat with her), the three Magrath sisters are raised by their grandparents. As women, the siblings go their separate ways. Lenny, the eldest, becomes everyone’s caregiver. Babe, the youngest, marries to continue being taken care of. Meg, the middle child, who discovered their mother’s body, leaves to pursue a Hollywood career. They reunite to celebrate Lenny’s birthday and fall right back into their birth order roles.

Beth Henley’s 1981 Pulitzer Prize and New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award-winning play spent three years on Broadway with an encore in 2005. It reached a wider audience via the 1986 film version starring Sissy Spacek, Jessica Lange, and the late Diane Keaton.

This summer, Red Door Productions, an up-and-coming female-owned NYC theater company, is bringing its signature fresh take to a story of one family’s resilience amidst a community whose currency is gossip, shaming, class distinction, and racial prejudice.

At the helm of the production is director Eve Bianco, a Juilliard-trained actor, teacher, and writer.

The new generation of actors playing the lead roles of Lenny, Meg, and Babe are Jacqui Bryne, Ana Radice-Morras, and Violet Levinson, respectively. Rounding out the cast are Luke Kissick as Babe’s lawyer/admirer Barnett Lloyd, Ronan Schwarz as Meg’s one-time love Doc Porter, and Branwyn Ritchie as brassy Chick Boyle, the sisters’ oh-so-pious and judgmental cousin who calls Meg “cheap Christmas trash,” yet has always harbored a deep desire to be considered the fourth sister.

Says the actor of her somewhat polarizing role, “I love playing characters like Chick who, at first glance, might feel like the villain. It’s a fun challenge to get inside her head and discover her humanity. I’m lucky to work with Eve, who’s so great at pulling that out. Chick wants to be heard, accepted, taken seriously. Fear of rejection is what spurs a lot of the behavior we see in the play.”

Behind the scenes, Cluanie Swanwick is the Stage Manager and Stevie Hebe is the Production Designer, with Roxane Pes as Costume Designer. Radice-Morras, Levinson, and Pes are also three of the five producing partners at Red Door.

Although the play was written 50 years ago, the mental health-related themes like loneliness, career disappointment, and bad decisions made in the name of love are more relevant than ever. “There was something so interesting about reading the play for the first time, getting an understanding of the story and the characters, and then working on it in a deeper way to discover how layered these characters are. To the core, it’s about hope and the complexities of family. We can all see a little bit of ourselves in that,” says Radice-Morras.

To make sure they did justice to the production, the team reached out to Henley, who resides in Los Angeles.

Bianco recounted part of their conversation with the Mississippi-born playwright: “She said, ‘Well, Honey, they just gotta be real. They’re all just real people. It’s got to be honest, and we got to believe them.’ And I just thought, that’s the way I work.” The director went on to describe finding “where the truth starts, then we can push to its largest form.”

The three acts take place in the kitchen, which Bianco calls “The heart of the home.”

The realism from the cast, which hails from Britain, New Hampshire, Texas, and Boston, begins with them leaning in to talking the talk. Says Bianco, “Everybody’s doing really great work on embracing that southern coastal dialect of Mississippi.”

Although both Levinson and Radice-Morras agree it would be a privilege to play any one the characters, Levinson admits, “Babe speaks to me. Whenever I’m working on her, I’m so excited and happy. It’s an honor to tell her story,” which is that of an innocent married to a prominent yet mean man, who has an affair with a local teen of color. Levinson adds, “I don’t think Babe’s really thinking about the age. He’s nice and kind to her, and that’s something she’s lacking: comfort and support.” Babe shoots her husband, albeit not fatally, when he goes after her lover.

Radice-Morras gravitated towards Meg. “She’s been through some things that I have personal experience with, and she’s just cool and fascinating,” yet at the same time, “there’s a lot of reckless behavior that comes from being in that [middle child] limbo, from being traumatized, yet afraid to be vulnerable. Meg did what she needed to do, which was to protect herself and run away.”

Nuanced performances and southern dialect aren’t the only things that shape the characters. Of her sartorial choices, Pes says, “[It’s] about capturing the individuality of the characters but also translating each of their emotional journeys into fabric, color, or a silhouette. The challenge, of course, is in making each outfit feel authentic to 1970s Mississippi while still highlighting the personality and evolution of each character throughout the story.”

When Meg and Babe finally celebrate Lenny’s birthday, the cake ablaze with candles comes to symbolize so much more than a party treat.

Says Bianco, “The play starts with hope, with Lenny making wishes and dreams on her own, and it ends with the three of them, still hopeful, still making wishes about being together, of connection and joy with one another. It’s really so beautiful. The simplicity and depth of that wish.”

Levinson adds, “It makes you think about them as kids eating cake before the struggles of life really kicked in.”

Radice-Morras summed up why audiences continue to come back to this show and why they will again this summer: “You can have some really bad things happen to you, but you can still live life by your own terms. That’s a message that is really important right now.”

“Crimes of the Heart” at the Theatre 154, 154 Christopher Street, opens July 15 to July 26.

Tickets are available via Eventbrite and Instagram.

Lorraine Duffy Merkl is the author of the novel, “The Last Single Woman In New York City.”