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Post-Standard, The (Syracuse,
NY)
October 9, 1999
Section: CNY
Edition: Final
Page: E6
'CRIMES OF THE HEART'
PROVES A CHALLENGE Appleseed
Productions tackles frantic and poignant black comedy.
Suzanne
M. Connelly, Contributing Writer
The McGrath sisters are having
a very bad series of days. Sister Babe is out on bail;
she shot her husband, Zachary, because she was tired of hearing his voice. Sister
Meg has
just returned from a stint
in the mental ward in a California hospital, and her singing career is
on the skids. Sister Lenny is mourning
the death of her horse, who has been struck by lightening, and almost everyone
has forgotten
her birthday. On top of it all, the sisters
have a meddling, overbearing cousin who lives next door, their grandfather
has had a stroke,
and they all have man trouble. Sound like a mess? Well,
it's just typical of the mayhem in Beth Henley's black comedy, "Crimes
of the Heart." Appleseed Productions has
chosen this play as its season opener. It's a tough show to pull off, with
its unusual mixture
of frantically funny and
touchingly poignant roles. The characters are all eccentric and their situations
strange; the
actors must successfully
blend a kind of zany humor with a sympathetic portrayal of some troubled
people. The
requirements of Southern
accents (the play takes place in a small Mississippi town) make the roles
even more of a
challenge. The structure of the play
doesn't lend itself to ease in production. Unfortunately, most of the play
is dialogue, punctuated
with little action, except
in the final scenes. The players must create an entire lexicon of stage
business to enhance the
visual aspects of the play. While the director and actors
try valiantly to overcome these challenges, the results in this production
are somewhat
uneven. Director Linda Lance
needs to drive the tempo of the play more forcefully toward its climax.
At two hours and
20 minutes, this overly-long
production seems to lose steam in several parts. The reproduction of Southern
accents in
also uneven, and in almost
all the characters, accents started to fade early on and were nonexistent
by the final curtain. The crux of the play is the
evolving relationship of the three sisters, who have come together to deal
with one crisis, and
seem to be plagued with
several more. While the three actresses must succeed with their individual
roles, it is the
interaction between the
sisters that is key to the success of any production. These three just
never seem to create
these critical connections. Roseanne Fortino as Meg gives
the most convincing performance. She is gritty and realistic as the sister
who has
always been able to put
on a good show and get what she wants. Fortino convinces the audience that
she is amoral,
ruthless and selfish - all
defenses for feelings of worthlessness and inadequacy. Amanda Raymond is pert as
the unflappable Babe, who admits to some pretty shocking indiscretions
and to being the
victim of domestic abuse,
and then blithely continues to play her saxophone or roll up her long blonde
hair on pink foam
rollers. Her attempted "suicide"
toward the end of the play is so ambivalent that the audience doesn't know
whether to
be shocked or to laugh. Kathleen Whipple as Lenny
has a real challenge - she is the "invisible" sister who is always whining
about the fact that
the other two have had it
better. Whipple hasn't quite found the center of her character, who is
central to much of the
action in the play. Shirley Seggara is unrelentingly
unlikable as Chick, the cousin. Peter Woods, playing an old flame of sister
Meg, and
Mark Allen Holt, as Babe's
lawyer, both need to pull back a bit on their roles, tempering their obvious
reactions with
more subtlety. Scott Hoehn has done a fine
job with the set, which creates a functional kitchen as a backdrop for
the action. Copyright (c) 1999 The Herald
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