Three Sisters.('Crimes of the Heart')(Theater review)

The playwright Beth Henley was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1952, and she has been working steadily since the late nineteen-seventies. In play after play, and in several film scripts (she co-authored the musician David Byrne's 1986 directorial debut, "True Stories"), we have been given the sense of a writer drunk on the scent of stale magnolia, one who has a reverence for lesser Southern dramatists such as Lillian Hellman or Carson McCullers. Henley's characters are lost and eccentric, women familiar from the roster of the Southern gothic, but her work lacks the bravery of writers who have mined similar territory to sharper effect: the West Virginia-born short-story writer Jayne Anne Phillips, for example, whose tales about drifters and speed freaks are capable of vulgarity and ugliness--and much greater emotional reach. Instead, Henley prefers to hide behind the froufrou one hears in her characters' Fannie Flagg-sounding whoops and hollers and sobs. As her characters talk in circles, skittering around the bowls of their consciousness, you might wonder what they and Henley are avoiding. Real thinking?

The current revival of Henley's 1981 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, "Crimes of the Heart" (a Roundabout Theatre production, at the Laura Pels), showcases her idiosyncrasies as a writer. In Henley's plays, there's much talk about the past, one reason being that her characters don't have much of a future. Her work is rarely propulsive--little moves forward, including her characters' ideas about the world. But that's O.K. Henley is essentially a portraitist; the stories that interest her are embedded in the carefully constructed monologues that her characters speak while they're eating a bowl of oatmeal, or gluing a broken heel to a boot. Under Kathleen Turner's direction, the production makes clear just how seductive the writer's Southern-fried world is to actors: Henley provides enough subtext for her characters to seem complicated, and just enough wackiness to allow an actor to show off.

The action begins in the fall of 1974, in the cozy kitchen of the Magrath sisters' house, in Hazelhurst, Mississippi. (The realistic set, by Anna Louizos, is beautifully lit by Natasha Katz.) It's the afternoon of Lenny's thirtieth birthday--an occasion she's prepared to mark on her own. Lenny (Jennifer Dundas) is small, with dark hair. She makes quick, decisive gestures. The eldest of the three Magrath sisters, Lenny has been taking care of the girls' grandfather for quite some time. Now that he's failing and in the local hospital, Lenny's brows are permanently knitted. She's baffled by her life, and we're baffled for her. Who or what can save her drowning soul? One of her out-to-lunch sisters?

In the midst of a crisis, the members of this all-female clan gather together. The youngest sister, Babe (Lily Rabe), has shot her loutish husband in the stomach and is now released on bail. Meanwhile, Lenny has sent a frantic telegram to their middle sister, Meg (Sarah Paulson), in Los Angeles, pleading with her to come home. Somewhat to Lenny's surprise, Meg turns up. She enters the memory-clogged kitchen, her hair streaked with blond, walking like a tall, rangy boy: you get the feeling that she has spent a fair amount of time with male session musicians while pursuing her dream of becoming a singer. Paulson is an exceptionally gifted performer. She anchors whatever production she's in with a kind of reasonableness that most actors shrink from--what's the point of acting sensible when you want to shine and sparkle?--and commands our attention because she is not afraid to ask for it. Dressed in form-fitting jeans, knocking back a whiskey and smoking a cigarette, her mere presence is suggestive of a wider world.

Of the three sisters, Babe is the most conventionally pretty; her creamy skin has an oleo gleam. But there's something a little off about her, too. When she tells a story, she's liable to drift, and she has a babyish habit of seizing on all the wrong details. When asked why she shot her husband, at first she says only, "I didn't like his looks." Later, she describes for her lawyer, Barnette Lloyd ...