SOURCE: A review of Crimes of the Heart, in Booklist, Vol. 79, No. 21, July, 1983, p. 1383.

In the following review of the published play, Parisi offers a laudatory assessment of Crimes of the Heart.

No wonder this play [Crimes of the Heart] won the Pulitzer—it has just about everything: sex, manslaughter, suicide, cat-slaying (all discreetly offstage), and abundant humor and humanity (front and center). In the grand, grotesque tradition of Southern Gothic, Henley's hilarious examination of hearth and heartstrings suggests parallels with Tennessee Williams and Flannery O'Connor. But such comparisons would be unfair, for Henley's distinct talents—though equally moving as those masters'—are more consistently comic. Her three sisters—would-be-murderer Babe, lounge-singer dropout Meg, and incipient spinster Lenny—are uniquely wacky, sensual, vulnerable, and, despite their incredible behavior, utterly believable. Foiled ambition, long-simmering frustration, and fantastic fumbling are economically combined in a complicated but cleverly managed plot, whose...