Crimes of the Heart

The Fridays @ 3 Play Reading series presents its final reading of the season with a classic American play, Crimes of the Heart, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981. Kathleen Turner directs a cast that includes Kerry Butler,
Jeanine Serralles, Patch Darragh, and Liz Wisan.

Warm-hearted, irreverent, zany and brilliantly imaginative, Crimes of the Heart teems with humanity and humor. In Hazlehurst, Mississippi, the three Magrath sisters have gathered to await news of the family patriarch, their grandfather, who is living out his last hours in the local hospital. Lenny, the oldest sister, is unmarried at thirty and facing diminishing marital prospects; Meg, the middle sister, who quickly outgrew Hazlehurst, is back after a failed singing career on the West Coast; while Babe, the youngest, is out on bail after having shot her husband in the stomach. Their troubles, grave and yet, somehow, hilarious, are highlighted by their priggish cousin, Chick and by the awkward young lawyer who tries to keep Babe out of jail while trying not to fall in love with her. In the end the play is the story of how its young characters escape the past to seize the future–but the telling is so true, touching and consistently funny that it will linger in the mind long after the curtain has descended.