SOURCE: Interview with Beth Henley, in Mississippi Writers Talking, by John Griffin Jones, University Press of Mississippi, 1982, pp. 169-90.

In the following conversation, Henley discusses her development as a playwright and her views of her craft.

This interview was conducted about a month before Beth won the Pulitzer Prize for her play, Crimes of the Heart. At the time of our meeting, the play had been accepted for the 1981 Broadway season, having just completed a successful five-week run off-Broadway in December 1980 and January 1981. Our mothers are friends of long standing, and it was through their combined efforts that I secured the scripts of Crimes of the Heart and The Miss Firecracker Contest, and then was able to interview Beth during one of her brief visits to her childhood home in Jackson. At twenty-eight, she was not inured to the interview process. She sat in a high-backed chair with...