[Crimes of the Heart] could have been written as drama, farce, absurdist comedy, or that particularly southern genre, the winsome horror story. It does indeed partake a little of each, but is chiefly a piece of heightened realism—heightened not into symbolism or expressionism or whatever realism usually gets heightened into, but into a concentrate.

The play is an essence, the essence of provincial living, with everything from a father who ran off and a mother who hanged herself and her cat to an invalid grandfather and a shrunken ovary that combine to cause emotional blockage, from guilt feelings based on too much popularity to defiance caused by not enough brains, visited on one or another or all three of these young women. This is a loving and teasing look back at deep-southern, small-town life, at the effect of constricted living and confined thinking on three different yet...