Though ["Crimes of the Heart"] is Miss Henley's first play, it has a daffy complexity of plot that old pros like Kaufman and Hart would have envied, and it marches at a pace that keeps us from ever questioning the degree of clever manipulation that we are being made subject to. We laugh almost from the first moment of the play to the last, and the curious fact of the matter is that what we laugh at is a succession of misfortunes inflicted upon people who lack the capacity to avoid them. It's evident that Miss Henley, who was born and raised in Mississippi, has sat at the feet of several of our most admired Southern writers, especially Eudora Welty, and her rueful comedy is all the richer for the high quality of its antecedents. Southern writers are masters of the art of exaggeration, of the tall tale...