SOURCE: “‘A Population [and Theater] at Risk’: Battered Women in Henley's Crimes of the Heart and Shepard's A Lie of the Mind,” in Modern Drama, Vol. 36, No. 1, March, 1993, pp. 83-95.

In the following essay, Haedicke compares the depiction of domestic violence in Shepard's A Lie of the Mind and Henley's Crimes of the Heart, asserting that Shepard's postmodernist drama “ignites a politics beyond Henley's modernist drama, which can kindle only kitchen fires.”

“The weeping of women who are wives—what is more bitter?”¹

Oft-castigated for its preponderance of family drama, American theater seems unprotestingly to cede stature to British theater, which has moved from “kitchen-sink” realism to presumably more universal and political plays. Yet the charge of triviality levelled against American “diaper drama”² in the theater dissipates in the face of the domestic drama currently being played on the cultural stage: statistics indicate that “An American resident is...