Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart has, to my surprise, sickened me instead of boring me. I had expected a piece of southern-fried kitsch that would tickle and lull its audience into peaceful satisfaction. Henley's cuckoo-bird talent, instead, mixes comedy and pathos in quickly alternating doses, like uppers and downers for an extended high, a trick that irritates me even in Chekhov, who at his best managed to fuse the two: All the disparate bits, in a play like Three Sisters, turn out on closer examination to be linked in theme and image.

Not so the three sisters of Henley's Hazelhurst, Mississippi: The playwright's pity and mockery are aimed at them in laser-gun bursts, arbitrary and unnerving, that have no organic connection and no deep roots. The play gives the impression of gossiping about its characters rather than presenting them, and the playwright's voice, though both individual and...