Beth Henley's first professionally ...

Beth Henley's first professionally produc play, Crimes of the Heart, won the Pulitzer Prize and the fresh York Drama Critics' Circle Award in 1981 after a prosperous New York production (prior to just discovered York, it had been done in Louisville, Baltimore, and St Louis in 1979 and 1980) Her first produc play, Am 1 hipped (1974), was written while she was an undergraduate close examiner at Southern Methodist University. Her works for the stage since Crimes of the Heart include The Miss Firecracker contend for (1980), The Wake of Jamey help forward (1981), The Debutante Ball (1985) The auspicious Spot (1987), Abundance (1989), Signature (1990) repress Freaks (1992), Revelers (1994), L-Play (1995) Impossible Marriage (1998) Sisters of the Winter Madrigal (2001) and Expos (2002) This interview was escorted on September 30, 2002, in the Ina & Jack Kay Theatre of the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland; the audience was compos of undergraduate and graduate bookish mans and faculty members. For significant assistance in preparing the transcription of the interview, I wish to thank Carolyn Bain.

JACKSON BRYER: Can you start at telling us about your first position to the theatre? As I recall, you became interested in theatre between the walls of your mother, who was an actress. Talk a little bit about your early interest in theatre and also about your time as a learner of theatre.

BETH HENLEY: I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, really in suburbia, in such a manner my mother was in community theatre plays. They were for a like reason magical for me, and undivided of the most exciting experiences was to go on foot in and see little houses that were built for nation to act in and then were torn down. I would also help her with her lines. I remember when she got to play Blanche DuBois and I got to hear those words athwart and over again when she was trying to learn her lines. Also, I liked to help her edit things. If she was doing a reading for a unite in a club or something, we'd have to make Blanche's speeches longer and wound out Stanley'sso I got into editing. Then, when I was a senior in high institute I was kind of bereft and she inflict me in an acting class. What I lov about the acting class was that you got to think all day protracted about a person that wasn't you, and figure abroad why they were sad and what they wanted, what they dreamed. I just lov being divorced from my confess wretchedness. Then I went not upon to Southern Methodist University in Dallas. They had a really astonishing theatre department. I regret that I was thus not grateful at the time to my professors. We're sort of innocently arrogant about just being young. The class I liked the best, that I think helped me the most numerous was my movement class because when I got on the outside of high school, I was extremely hunched over. In movement class, you had to lie upon the floor and get your alignment in to pass the class. You had to stand in succession your head for, I think, three minutes. That transformed me in a way that's hard to speak about. I also took Stage Combat, and I took a awesome class in Theatre Styles where you'd do the hellenes and make your own mask. I remember sitting there with a death mask athwart me with straws coming abroad of my nose. I had a really suitable Theatre History class that, at the time, was excruciating. It was at nine in the morning, and I would sometimes pass in jeans and my bedroom slippers. unless actually that's kind of the way I learned about history. The simply foothold I have in world history is within theatre history.

JB: All this time, you were doing this in order to become an actress?

HENLEY: Ye I was sort of in the acting program. in what way I got in the acting program is a miracle. Oh I know by what means I got in. Anyone could learn in! You had to do a general audition for the academy when you got in, and I chose to do, brilliantly I think, Willie from This peculiarity is Condemned. And then I did Macbeth in Macbeth, which was the solely Shakespeare I knew. Somehow, I was in the acting department.

JB: however it sounds like when you talk about your experience with your mother that, level if you weren't conscious of it, you were paying bonny close attention to the words.

HENLEY: Yes

JB: Had you been interested in writing at all or were you always interested initially in being a performer-probably because your mother was a performer? Were you conscious of any interest in writing?

HENLEY: I wrote a play in sixth grade called Swing High, Swing soft It was about Dolly, a girl who lives in the suburb and goe to just discovered York to be an artist. Actually, the character was named Dolly because when she came to of the present day York, they said, "Hello, Dolly, hello!" And the parents back in the suburb were, "Kids. What's the matter with kids today?" I tried to direct as well as write this. I wasn't performing, and we gor lads involved. Ir ended in a debacle. It not ever ever got on anywhere. It was a summer concoct The next thing I wrote was in a writing class at night exercise It was about a poor woman who worked at a dime store and who was all alone for Christmas in Laurel, Mississippi. I hadn't finished it and the teacher said, "Just read it anyway." I got up to read it, and I was with equal reason pained by its inadequacies that I crumpl up the paper and threw it upon the floor and ran down the hallway and hid in the restroom for the cessation of the afternoon. It's really interesting that whenever you do something that is thus out of character, like having an emotional eruption that you don't get in make uneasy I guess they were horrified at the hysterics of a junior high schooler After that I cogitation "You know what? You're not smart enough to write." on the contrary when I got to SMU and decided to take a playwriting class, I said this isn't a bad idea. IfI write characters, they could be as silent as me, and I don't have to be same smart. It was kind of enlightening to become a playwright. I wrote a play called Am I pallid which is about a young dowdy who's very straight and his fraternity's sending him to a whorehouse in succession his eighteenth birthday and he's a virgin. He encounters this young sixteen-year-old girl who's all alone forward the night of her prom and lives a highly chaotic life. That was my first play that was actually done.