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Crimes of the Heart

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Runs: 09/21/11 — 10/09/11
Opening Night: 09/23/11
Event Time: 7:30pm (2:00pm Sunday matinees)
Tickets: $25 (adults), $19 (seniors & students), $12 (previews)

They’re funny, they’re Southern, they’re dysfunctional—and they’re coming to the Venetian Theatre for the opening of the 2011-2012 season!

As Christopher Isherwood wrote in his review, Crimes of the Heart is a little bit Chekhov and a little bit Eudora Welty, and tells a twangy Southern story of the three Magrath sisters loving, feuding and fussing through a very bad day. How bad? Well, Babe has just shot her husband, Meg is fresh from the loony bin, and poor Lenny celebrates her 30th birthday alone in the kitchen by sticking a candle in a cookie and making wish after desperate wish. Her horse has been struck by lightning, and Grandpa, who raised the girls after their mother’s sensational suicide (she hung the family cat as well as herself), is laid up in the hospital, possibly forever.

Beth Henley’s 1981 Pulitzer Prize-winning black comedy is equal parts prickly emotional thickets and Dixie-style gallows humor. Crimes of the Heart, one of the best known plays in American drama, delivers a compassionate look at good country people whose lives have gone wrong, shading the story with a dark and penetrating sense of humor.

What better way for Bag&Baggage to open their fourth season at the Venetian Theatre than with one of the best known, most acclaimed American plays in the last 50 years?

Lemonade, y'all?

Note: The subject matter of this play is most appropriate for audiences ages 15+ (discussion of adult content, such as abuse and adultery).