Beth Henley's twelve complete plays (three of which have been turned into films) have achieved worldwide production. At age 29, she produced her first full-length drama, Crimes of the Heart, which won a Pulitzer Prize and garnered three Academy Award nominations as a film. Her Mississippi upbringing and her penchant for the eccentricities of southern culture, however, have caused critics to categorize her writing as a kind of southern gothic folklore inspired by feminist ideology. This book, the first critical study of Henley's complete plays, attempts to dispel the common stereotypes that associate Henley's work with regional drama and sociological treatises. It argues instead that Henley can best be perceived as a dramatist who delineates an existential despair manifested in various forms of what Freud calls the modern neurosis. The book maintains that Henley's plays must be understood as universal statements about the angst of modern civilization, and Henley's characters are assessed in light of Freud's proposition that cultural restrictions create neurotic individuals. The introduction provides a brief account of Henley's childhood and career. Early chapters summarize the theory of the modern angoisse espoused in Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, while later chapters relate this theory to thematic and stylistic elements of Henley's most popular play, Crimes of the Heart, as well as Am I Blue, The Wake of Jamie Foster, The Miss Firecracker Contest, The Debutante Ball, The Lucky Spot, Abundance, Signature, Control Freaks, Revelers, L-Play, and Impossible Marriage.

Beth Henley was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Drama and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play for her first full-length play, Crimes of the Heart, yet there has been no book-length consideration of her body of work until now. This volume includes original essays that contextualize and analyze her works from a variety of perspectives, focusing on her vexed status as a southern writer, her use of the comic grotesque, and her alleged feminist critiques of modern society. Receiving special attention are lesser-known plays which are crucial to understanding Henley's development as a playwright and postmodern thinker.

Beth Henley remains best known for 'Crimes of the Heart', a play that won the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and later was made into a major motion picture. This introduction to the Mississippi-born playwright and her body of work presents Henley's plays as a unified whole.

With roots in the American South, Beth Henley (b. 1952) has for four decades been a working playwright and screenwriter. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 at the age of twenty-eight, Henley so far has written twenty-five produced plays that are always original, usually darkly comic, and often experimental. In these interviews, Henley speaks of the plays, from her early crowd-pleasers, Crimes of the Heart and The Miss Firecracker Contest, to her more experimental plays, including The Debutante Ball and Control Freaks, to her brilliant and time-bending play, The Jacksonian. Henley is a master at writing about the duality of human experience—the beautiful and the grotesque, the cruel and the loving. This duality provokes in Henley both amazement and compassion. She discusses here not only her admiration for Chekhov and other influences, but also her process of bringing a play from notebooks of images and bits of dialogues through rumination, writing, and rewriting to rehearsals and previews. The interviews range from 1981, just before she won the Pulitzer Prize, to 2020 and cover nearly forty years of a creative life, which, as Henley remarks in the most recent interview, is “such a life worth living: to be in tune with the creative process.”

These four plays by one of American theatre's most celebrated writers are populated by people who lead lives of distinctly unquiet desperation. The plays are: The Lucky Spot, The Miss Firecracker Contest, The Wake of Jamey Foster, and Abundance.

A selective list of publications for the period, offering some 25,200 entries (no annotations) arranged by nationality and linguistic groups. Most entries concern literary currents in drama since the last third of the 19th century, playwrights who lived at least part of their lives in the 20th century, noted directors, and performance theory. For students and scholars of modern dramatic literature. While annual supplements of recent publications appear in the journal Modern Drama, new compilers took a publication date of 1991 as their starting point for listings, leaving some 2,000 items collected after 1992 appearing only in this volume. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

From the early 20th century to the present, Southern literary talent has flourished. The newer poets, dramatists, essayists, and novelists of this region often use their writings to explore the changing social values of the South, while also drawing upon traditional Southern values and culture. This reference work is a guide to the writings of 50 contemporary Southern poets, dramatists, essayists, and novelists. Many of the authors profiled in this volume have established themselves as writers of lasting significance. However, the book also profiles the careers and work of authors who are emerging only now as masters of their art. Each chapter in this book is devoted to a single author, and arranged alphabetically for the reader's convenience. Each is written by an expert on the author, and includes a biographical sketch, a discussion of major themes, a survey of criticism, and a bibliography of works by and about the author. An introductory essay overviews modern Southern writing, and a selected, general bibliography concludes the work.

"The author of A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof drew on personal and family drama for material. Essays examine how Williams's confessional style influenced Inge, Mamet, Kushner, Lori-Parks and others. There is a special study of African-American theater. Features interview with Albee on Williams' influence"--Provided by publisher.

This is a study of the state of research on and history of performances of 40 American playwrights, including major mainstream, ethnic, and regional playwrights. The essays list their published and unpublished plays, as well as their other works; document the performances; identify bibliographies, biographies, critical studies, and analyses of the plays; and discuss the critical reception. The volume deals with production histories, covering critics, actors, directors, and theater companies that have contributed as much to theater as the playwrights themselves. It also discusses original screenplays and identifies writing on younger playwrights on whom research has just begun. ISBN 0-313-25543-1: $66.00 (For use only in the library).