General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 202610 min read

Crimes of the Heart

Crimes of the Heart is a full-length dramatic comedy in two acts by the American playwright Beth Henley, first staged in 1979, about the three Magrath sisters who reunite in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, while the youngest is out on bail for shooting her husband. It won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 1981 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best American Play, ran 535 performances on Broadway, and was adapted by Henley into a 1986 film directed by Bruce Beresford.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Author	Beth Henley, born 1952 in Jackson, Mississippi; the play was her first full-length work³^•⁴
First production	February 1979, Actors Theatre of Louisville, after co-winning the theater's Great American Play contest²^•⁴
Broadway run	John Golden Theatre, opening November 4, 1981, closing February 13, 1983; 13 previews and 535 performances, directed by Melvin Bernhardt¹
Awards	1981 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; 1981 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best American Play; four 1982 Tony nominations including Best Play²
Setting and cast	Hazlehurst, Mississippi, five years after Hurricane Camille; four women and two men; running time over 120 minutes¹^•²
Film adaptation	1986, directed by Bruce Beresford, written by Henley, starring Diane Keaton, Jessica Lange, and Sissy Spacek; 105 minutes, released December 12, 1986⁵
Film honors	Three Academy Award nominations: Best Actress (Spacek), Best Supporting Actress (Tess Harper), and Henley's adapted screenplay; Spacek won a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical⁵

Spoilers

Plot

Hazlehurst, Mississippi, late 1970s. Lenny Magrath (Diane Keaton) stands in the kitchen of the family house trying to light the candles on her thirtieth-birthday cake. They will not stay lit. She gives up, eats a bite of the cake alone, and then the phone rings: her youngest sister, Babe (Sissy Spacek), has shot her husband Zackery, a prominent local lawyer, and is in the county jail. Lenny calls Meg (Jessica Lange), the middle sister, who left for California years ago and has not been back.

The reunion is thick with old scores. Meg arrives full of Hollywood swagger, but the town remembers her differently: she left after their grandfather's stroke, and after humiliating a boy named Willie Jay and his family. Lenny has quietly given up on her own life; she answered a personals ad once and never followed through, and she resents Meg for having at least tried. Circling the house is their cousin Chick (Tess Harper), a purse-lipped snob mortified by the scandal who keeps arriving to deliver insults disguised as concern. Babe, for her part, seems oddly serene about having shot a man, and will not say why.

Babe's young lawyer, Barnette Lloyd, takes the case, and it becomes clear he has a personal grudge: Zackery ruined him once before. But the defense has a problem. Babe fired the shot in front of witnesses, and if she will not give a reason, the court will not be kind. Meanwhile Old Granddaddy, the sisters' grandfather and the town's patriarch, lies in a coma in the local hospital, and Meg, drinking steadily since she arrived, cannot make herself walk into his room.

The scene people remember is Lenny's birthday, round two. After the failed candles, the sisters stage a proper celebration, and it collapses into hysteria: Meg lights the candles, Lenny blows them out in a rush, the cake is ruined, and the three women end up on the kitchen floor laughing and sobbing at the same time, grief and farce indistinguishable. Roger Ebert singled out the earlier moment in the same register, when Meg, freshly returned from an affair with a married man, learns that Old Granddaddy has slipped into a coma and the sisters dissolve into giggles, calling that scene a masterpiece of the film's tone.⁹

The truth about Babe comes out in pieces. She shot Zackery because he had beaten her for years and was about to destroy the one thing she loved: her friendship with Willie Jay, a Black teenager she had grown close to. When Willie Jay is run out of town and Babe sees no way out, she turns on herself, sealing herself in the kitchen oven and turning on the gas. Meg and Lenny pull her out in time. In the aftermath, with Babe teetering on the edge of despair, she finally understands why their mother hanged herself years earlier, taking the family cat with her, a mystery no one had ever explained. Sitting in the wreckage of her own marriage, Babe grasps it intuitively, and the question that has haunted all three sisters breaks open.¹⁴

Barnette engineers the escape hatch: he buries evidence that could hurt Babe and builds a defense around provocation, and Babe walks with a light sentence and a promise to leave town. Lenny finally calls Charlie, the man from the personals ad, and steps out of her shell. Meg reconnects with Doc Porter (Sam Shepard), the boy she loved and abandoned years before. The film ends with the three sisters walking out of the house together, giddy and goofy and lighter than they have been all movie, headed into whatever comes next as a family.¹⁴

Characters

Lenny Magrath (Diane Keaton) is the eldest, the dutiful one, who has talked herself into being grateful for a shrunken life, and whose gratitude cracks open over the course of the film.

Meg Magrath (Jessica Lange) is the glamorous middle sister, a would-be singer whose California confidence is a front over failure, an affair with a married doctor, and a drinking problem.

Babe Magrath Botrelle (Sissy Spacek) is the youngest, sunny and guileless even in a jail cell, and the film's darkest material lives in the gap between her cheerfulness and what her marriage actually was.

Doc Porter (Sam Shepard) is Meg's old flame, now a local man with a family of his own, who offers her a second chance she is not sure she deserves.

Chick Boyle (Tess Harper) is the cousins' self-appointed moral watchdog, a comic monster of small-town propriety who wants the Magrath name kept out of the papers.

Barnette Lloyd (Don S. Davis) takes Babe's case for reasons of his own, a grudge against Zackery, and becomes the sisters' co-conspirator.

Interpretations and controversies

The film's tonal gamble, playing suicide, domestic violence, and a mother's hanging as comedy, divided critics from the start. Roger Ebert praised it as "a comedy about serious matters" existing "between parody and melodrama."⁹ The New York Times, by contrast, called it a "totally humorless star turn,"¹⁵ and the Los Angeles Times deemed it "excruciating."¹⁶ A retrospective essay reads the film's lasting appeal in its portrait of sisterhood and female resilience under a restrictive Southern order.¹⁷

The play

The action takes place in the Magrath family home in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, in the fall, five years after Hurricane Camille; Henley's stage directions fix the period by that storm rather than by a stated year.¹^•⁶ The three sisters gather to await news of their grandfather, who is living out his last hours in the local hospital. At thirty, the eldest, Lenny, remains unmarried as her chances of marriage shrink; middle sister Meg has returned following an unsuccessful West Coast singing career; and the youngest, Babe, has been released on bail for shooting her husband in the stomach. Their troubles are framed by their priggish cousin Chick and by Babe's awkward young lawyer, who falls in love with her while trying to keep her out of jail.²

A shared memory hangs over the sisters: their mother hanged herself, along with the family cat, in the family house, an event the youngest sister Meg discovered as a child.⁷^•⁸ The play is written as a dramatic comedy for four women and two men, and Concord Theatricals, its licensing agent, describes it as examining "the plight of three young Mississippi sisters betrayed by their passions."²

Production history

Henley initially could not find a theater willing to produce the play until a friend, without her knowledge, entered it in the Great American Play Contest at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, which it co-won; the theater staged it in February 1979.⁴^•⁶ After productions across the United States, it premiered off-Broadway at Stage 73 on December 9, 1980, and then moved to Broadway.²^•⁴

The Broadway production opened at the John Golden Theatre on November 4, 1981, produced by Warner Theatre Productions, Inc. and others, with scenic design by John Lee Beatty, costumes by Patricia McGourty, lighting by Dennis Parichy, and sound by Lou Shapiro. It ran 535 performances before closing on February 13, 1983.¹

Awards and reception

In 1981 Henley became the first woman in 28 years to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and the play also took the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, Newsday's Guggenheim Award, and a Tony nomination for Best Play.⁴ Early reviews were strongly favorable; John Simon, writing in New York magazine of the off-Broadway production, said the play "restores one's faith in our theatre," a line the New York Post echoed in variant form.⁸^•² The New York Times praised Henley's ability to "serve us pain as though it were a piece of cake."²

The 1986 film

Jonathan Demme was originally attached to direct for executive producer Burt Sugarman, as reported in November 1981, when Diane Keaton was in talks to star; Bruce Beresford ultimately directed.⁵ Producer Freddie Fields said every major studio declined to finance a film without gratuitous sex, violence, or car chases, and by the time Dino De Laurentiis agreed to back it, Keaton, Jessica Lange, and Sissy Spacek had accepted a 75 percent pay cut, with Beresford and the crew also working for reduced fees.⁵ The budget was set at $11 million, adjusted to $10 million at the start of shooting, and the film was completed for $9 million.⁵

Principal photography began on May 5, 1986, in Southport, North Carolina, and ran nine weeks. Henley worked with Beresford on the screenplay in Australia, where they looked for ways to move scenes "out of the kitchen," the play's sole location; the filmmakers rented or bought every house on North Caswell Street in Southport to stand in for Hazlehurst.⁵ The cast added Sam Shepard as Doc Porter and Hurd Hatfield as Old Granddaddy, and the film gives fully realized screen roles to characters only discussed in the play, including Old Granddaddy, Zackery, and Willie Jay.⁵^•⁸

The film opened in Los Angeles and New York on December 12, 1986, and received mixed reviews. Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun-Times critic who won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for criticism, called it "a comedy about serious matters" that lives "somewhere between parody and melodrama"; Vincent Canby of the New York Times called it "a majestic, totally humorless star turn" for its three leads.⁹^•¹⁰ It earned the three Academy Award nominations noted above, and Spacek won a Golden Globe.⁵ The Numbers records a domestic gross of $22,905,000 on an opening weekend of $1,402,921 in 246 theaters, expanding to a maximum of 685 theaters; Rotten Tomatoes lists the gross as $19.3 million.¹¹^•¹²

Other adaptations and legacy

In a rare reversal of the usual direction of adaptation, Claudia Reilly published a novel titled Crimes of the Heart in 1986, based on Henley's play.⁸ The play remains in license with Dramatists Play Service, with a minimum fee of $130 per performance, and regional productions have continued since the original run, including one at A Contemporary Theatre in Seattle in mid-1983.²^•¹³

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026