SOURCE: "Her First Play, Her First Pulitzer Prize," in Saturday Review, Vol. 8, No. 11, November, 1981, pp. 40, 42, 44.

The following article includes a favorable assessment of Crimes of the Heart, as well as comments on the play by Henley and others.

Beth Henley can go home again, but it isn't easy. "I'm allergic to Mississippi," she drawls. "Even when I was growing up there, I'd always have these allergies to certain things. Sometimes, when I go back, my eyes swell up, and I look horrible. I have to leave because I just keep sneezing and sneezing."

The Mississippi countryside seems to provoke dramatic reactions from Beth Henley: It serves as the setting for her three-act play, Crimes of the Heart, which opens on Broadway this month. Following its much-praised off-Broadway premiere last winter, critic John Simon announced that Henley's work "restores one's faith in the theater" [New York Magazine, 12 January 1981]. The...