Beth Henley, where ya been?
Henley won a 1981 Pulitzer for the loopy “Crimes of the Heart,” and it felt like a long overdue reemergence when she scored an off-Broadway hit two years ago with an all-star cast (Ed Harris, Amy Madigan, Bill Pullman, Glenne Headly). “The Jacksonian” was a pitch-dark noir comedy with sex and drugs and a 1964 Mississippi murder, a scenario that cut close to Henley’s upbringing in civil rights-era Jackson, Miss.
"Beth Henley was back," director and longtime friend David Schweizer says of the public hug that greeted the playwright, whose steady output hadn't made a dramatic splash in years.
“When I finished,” says Henley, 62, “I was exhausted to the extent I wasn’t sure I wanted to write another play.”
She craved escape and found it with “Laugh,” a knockabout comedy premiering at Studio Theatre in the District (performances began Wednesday).
The new work took shape as Henley — whose works are almost inescapably described with such terms as “quirky” and “Southern gothic” — calmed herself with giggly 1920s Hollywood comedies. Her leading characters in “Laugh” are modeled on early movie stars Fatty Arbuckle and Mabel Normand, and the show at Studio even features live piano accompaniment a la pre-talkie films, with original music by “Peter and the Starcatcher” composer Wayne Barker.
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“She just wanted to lighten up,” says Schweizer, who is directing “Laugh.” “So this has a vaudeville structure. That’s the easiest way to put it. It’s derived from a deep affection for silent movie and early talkie culture.”
Henley has always been funny, of course. Remember Sissy Spacek, as the daffy Babe, casually pouring sugar into her Coke after she gut-shot her husband in the movie version of “Crimes of the Heart”? And this bit of faux-tough dialogue from “The Jacksonian” was widely quoted:
I can’t marry Eva. She smells like broken-up crayons in a dirty room.
Yeah. All the colors you don’t want to use.
Yet the playwright says the humor in "Laugh" feels different and riskier. "It's slapstick," Henley says. "So obviously ... " She searches for the explanation, then finds it. "We need some laughs."
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It may seem odd — as well as a nice catch for Studio — that a heavy hitter like Henley is debuting her latest work in a small, rough upstairs space in the District. Sitting in the busy atrium hub upstairs at Studio, Henley smiles broadly and often, and her native drawl peeks through now and then. “I don’t really know what people are sayin’, if they are sayin’ somethin’,” she says of her inattention to social media.
Henley’s fame crested in the 1980s, powered by “Crimes” and a partnership with actress Holly Hunter that spanned more than a half-dozen plays. Hunter made her Broadway debut as a replacement in “Crimes,” and she reprised her stage turn as a beauty queen wannabe in the 1989 film of Henley’s “Miss Firecracker.”
People magazine described Henley this way in 1986: “With her cute little bangs and white ankle socks, Beth Henley may look like the world’s oldest living Girl Scout.” Her Hollywood output that year included the screenplay for the Rosanna Arquette-Eric Roberts picture “Nobody’s Fool,” and she collaborated with talking Heads frontman David Byrne and her then-beau, actor Stephen Tobolowski, on the oddball movie “True Stories.”
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It was the high-water mark for her movie career, though for years Henley got paid to write Hollywood projects that didn’t get made. That’s standard in L.A., where a subclass of writers for hire does very well cranking out scripts that never get past executives’ desks.
“And they’re living in big houses,” says Henley, who describes her own California house as a simple indoor-outdoor Spanish affair. How many of these dead-end scripts did she write? “A lot,” she reckons.
Meanwhile, Henley the playwright has been hiding in plain sight.
“I think it’s a tough thing to win a Pulitzer Prize for your first play,” says Goodman Theatre artistic director Robert Falls, who has known Henley since they were at the University of Illinois and who directed “The Jacksonian” in Los Angeles and then New York. Though the results have varied, Henley’s output has been pretty steady, with 1980s Southern gothic comedies giving way to 1990s experiments.
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“I think she’s written five or six absolutely first-rate major American plays and a bunch of others that were more experimental,” Falls says, adding that he admires Henley “almost more than any playwright I know.”
“She has really tried to push the form and push language,” he says, “with some success and, often I think, probably not success.”
Often the debuts took place out of the limelight, and sometimes the reviews were rough — though even as the New York Times was calling Henley’s 2006 “Ridiculous Fraud” (about the misfortunes of a peculiar New Orleans clan) at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre “all cracks and precious little comedy,” the review also noted that “Ms. Henley's gift for dialogue variously lyrical and comic is still in good form.”
By 2013 the Times judged “The Jacksonian” to be “her most entertaining work since she won the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award for ‘Crimes of the Heart’ three decades ago,” and added, “The characters here are all plumb crazy.” Schweizer describes “The Jacksonian” as “ferocious,” but he says the “comeback” hardly represented a wholesale makeover.
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"It's like, 'Beth Henley — our sweet little Southern girl?' " Schweizer says of "The Jacksonian" reception. "But Beth's plays have always displayed a sly dark comic sensibility mingled with a warmer, more tender, quasi-naturalist feeling."
The gap between “Ridiculous Fraud” and “The Jacksonian” was the longest of Henley’s career, in part, she says, because it took her so long to get a handle on the rage she felt toward the 1960s of the latter play. She doesn’t flinch from labeling segregation as apartheid, and she says she knew about the escalating struggle “in a kid way.”
“I was aware there was a danger when James Meredith went to Ole Miss and they had to bring in the National Guard,” she says of the famous 1962 incident. “And my mother was worried because Kathy Stevens, our neighbor, was going out for rush that year. And this was just mucking it all up.”
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One of her sisters had a fifth-grade teacher she adored. It turns out the teacher was a KKK supporter who was shot during a Klan attempt to blow up the home of a Jewish activist. "She loved her fifth-grade teacher," Henley says. "So it's very complicated. People think it's so cut and dried, and the terror of it is that it's not. ... You don't have anything to compare it with until you step back and talk to other people about their childhoods: 'You didn't have bombs down the street?' "
Henley readily acknowledges that it might have been better for her career to headquarter in the country’s theatrical capital, but she never set up shop in New York. She has been in Los Angeles since the late 1970s.
“It’s got beautiful light,” she explains. She likes the ocean and the California anonymity; she has raised a 19-year-old son there as a single mother. She also prefers the laid-back culture. She calls L.A. manners “dodgy” and practically nonexistent. That’s a bracing change for someone who had a proper Mississippi upbringing in the 1950s and 1960s.
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"There was the Southern way," Henley says. It was lovely but stiff. Henley makes wisecracks about using the wrong fork and about a social code that had housewives dressing up to go to the grocery store.
“I just go like this,” she says, flapping her blue flannel shirt.
Henley’s not sure what she’ll write after “Laugh,” which she figures is as big a stylistic departure as she has ever ventured. She’s not generating screenplays anymore; instead, she teaches playwriting at Loyola Marymount University.
“She is not someone with a sense in her makeup of missed opportunities,” Schweizer says. “She’s had a very full life.”
Asked what she sees looking across her 17 plays, Henley says, "I see ... struggle." She laughs, but of course she's serious: "Struggling to understand," she explains. "Or illuminate. To stand. To express. Or flee from. That's basically it."
Laugh By Beth Henley. Through April 19 at Studio Theatre, 1501 14th St. NW. Tickets: $44-$88, subject to change. Call 202-332-3300 or visit www.studiotheatre.org.
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