'Laugh' (Studio Theatre, Washington, D.C.)

I seem to be having a run of plays that have made me think the authors all came up with a gimmick or a plot idea first and then devised a theme or point as an excuse to use it.  Back in January, it was Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Choir Boy at the Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C. (gospel singing); early in March, it was New York’s Signature Theatre Company’s Big Love by Charles Mee (modernizing Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Women); and now it’s Beth Henley’s Laugh, a world première presentation also at Washington’s Studio.  (The ROT reports on Choir Boy and Big Love were posted on 24 January and 18 March, respectively.) 

On Sunday, 22 March, I drove into the District from suburban Maryland to see the matinee performance of Laugh at Studio’s Logan Circle base.  It’s Henley’s first outing since The Jacksonian in 2013; her previous script was 2006’s Ridiculous Fraud (about which ROT contributor Kirk Woodward posted on 20 November 2014).  Laugh started previews on the thrust stage of the Mead Theatre, Studio’s largest space at 218 seats, on 11 March, and opened on 15 March; the production’s scheduled to close on 19 April.  Though I suspect that Henley and director David Schweizer, the writer’s longtime friend, have their eyes on a New York transfer, no plans have been announced.

Henley, 63 this May, was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and graduated from Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 1974 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in acting.  A member of the university acting troupe (Henley’s mother, Elizabeth, was an actress), she also wrote her first play at SMU, a one-act called Am I Blue.  From 1975 to 1976, she taught playwriting at the University of Illinois in Urbana (now UI at Urbana-Champaign) and the Dallas Minority Repertory Theater.   In 1976, Henley moved to Los Angeles, where she currently lives, and now teaches playwriting at Loyola Marymount University in LA.  

The playwright has been identified as a “Southern” playwright all her career.  (This is partly what Kirk examines in “Beth Henley and Ridiculous Fraud.”)  Her first professionally produced play was Crimes of the Heart, which débuted as the winner of the Great American Play Contest at the Actors Theatre of Louisville in 1979.  It was produced Off-Broadway by the Manhattan Theatre Club the next year and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1981.  (The production won or was nominated for several other awards, including a Tony nom for Best Play, and the playwright’s film adaptation in 1986 garnered Henley an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.)  Henley has also worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood, adapting her own play for Miss Firecracker, 1989, and writing the scripts for True Stories and Nobody's Fool, both 1986.  Through the late ’70s and the ’80s, Henley wrote essentially naturalistic tragicomedies about the small-town South, among them The Miss Firecracker Contest (1979) and The Wake of Jamey Foster (1981), emphasizing the female characters, but in the later ’80s and the ’90s, the writer branched out and began experimenting, though somewhat under the public’s radar.  (Like Laugh at Studio, many of her premières have been in small rep companies outside New York City.)  As Studio artistic director David Muse says, “If you haven’t paid attention to her work lately, I have a surprise for you: Beth Henley is a genre-defying stylistic innovator.”  The Jacksonian, a play about the ’60s civil rights movement in her native city, Mississippi’s segregated capital, has been described as a noir play with a twisty and fragmented plot that depicts extreme violence; Ridiculous Fraud was dubbed a “crackpot comedy” by Charles Isherwood in the New York Times.

The gimmick in Laugh is that it mimics the antics of old movies, especially the silents and the early talkies.  The leading characters are Mabel and Roscoe, named for silent-film legends Mabel Normand (1892-1930) and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle  (1887-1933).  Other characters are composites or parodies of Hollywood figures in the stars’ lives and the early film industry.  After the work on The Jacksonian, a play the Washington Post’s Nelson Pressley describes as “a pitch-dark noir comedy with sex and drugs and a 1964 Mississippi murder,” Henley says, “I was exhausted to the extent I wasn’t sure I wanted to write another play.”  After living with The Jacksonian, which American Theatre senior editor Rob Weinert-Kendt calls “bottomlessly bleak,” the playwright thought, “I just want to laugh.”  (There was a seven-year gap following Ridiculous Fraud, the longest lay-off of Henley’s career, because the dramatist reportedly had to come to terms with her rage at the subject matter of The Jacksonian, based on her own experiences as a young girl in her hometown.)  Making people laugh, she adds, “is the most subversive thing to do,” and one thing that makes Henley laugh are old movies.  “I just love the world of film, silent film, and of vaudeville,” she confesses, so she began experimenting with “the world without any language.”  She was especially inspired by Normand and Arbuckle—Normand’s “rebellious spirit, her zest for life” and Arbuckle’s pratfalls (which are limned in Laugh by Roscoe as well as other characters).

Watching the silent comedies of Max Sennett and Hal Roach “just made me feel so good,” Henley asserts, and she became fascinated with a world that was just inventing itself.  She also wanted to “explore identity,” the way we reveal and disguise ourselves to others, especially the way actors take on alternative personas.  “So I imagined an ensemble of actors to tell this story,” Henley continues, “and I have two main characters who take on disguises themselves.”  Thus was Laugh—which follows the adventures of Mabel, recently orphaned and independently wealthy, as she moves in with her greedy aunt who requires her nephew, Roscoe, to woo Mabel to control her fortune—conceived, and Schweizer’s production at Studio includes multiple disguises (including a few quick changes), falls, pies in the face (a gag Arbuckle pioneered in film), and other staples of vaudeville, music hall, and old flicks.  Normand and Arbuckle, who made many film together, also both worked extensively with (and for) Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.  The staging shows quite a few instances of one actor or another channeling Chaplin and, it seemed to me, Stan Laurel and Margaret Dumont.  As director Schweizer, whom Henley affirms she’s known and admired for many years and with whom she did a workshop in Palo Alto, California, observes, “It’s derived from a deep affection for silent movie and early talkie culture.”

As a tribute to old movies, the two-hour, episodic Laugh (which includes one intermission) is twice too long to sustain its internal humor.  Unless you’re an indefatigable fan of old flickers—and I’m not all that fond of the silents, myself—the conceit wears thin before the first hour ends.  But Henley purports to have other ideas on her mind.  In her interview with the Studio literary director, the playwright states that Laugh “is a play about love, and about understanding yourself.”  It’s also about greed and power—and who wields it (Normand was one of the first female movie stars to take control of her own career and start her own production company)—and the disparity between the illusion of Hollywood glamour and glitter and the gritty, sometimes nasty reality.  (The play includes a slo-mo orgy, certainly a reference to the scandalous party that derailed Arbuckle’s career, and a shooting much like the one that tarnished Normand’s reputation.)  The problem I had was that Henley’s purported themes seem secondary to the set-up and aren’t all that strongly delineated.  They’re also not really topics that aren’t often explored in other plays, stories, films, and even TV shows.  The result is that the theatrical framework, the homage to old movies and old Hollywood, overpowers the dramatic content.  To borrow a line I quoted in the report on my last theater experience, Charles Mee’s Big Love, if the movie parody is Henley “scaffolding” the way Greek tragedy was for Mee, and she “threw away the scaffolding” as he says he does, Laugh would simply collapse because there’s not enough substance left to keep it standing.  (Unless, as I said, you’re really queer for old flicks.)

None of this is the fault of the performances (unlike, say, the problem I had with the Studio production of McRaney’s Choir Boy).  Schweizer’s six actors do yeoman’s work and more as the director seems to have encouraged his talented company to reach for the rafters.  Not only do they execute the technical demands of Schweizer’s Laugh, the physical comedy, but they handle Henley’s overbaked lines, which she herself describes as “influenced by the written dialogue cards between the scenes in the silent films,” with conviction and grace—if that’s the word to describe what transpires in Henley and Schweizer’s slapstick universe.  I don’t know the work of any of this cast, so I can’t say if Laugh marks a stretch for any of them or if they are all accustomed to this kind of extreme acting, but in either instance, they all did magnificent jobs with their roles (and four of the actors play multiple roles over the span of the play). 

As Mabel, the ward of a prospector in the California Gold Rush who’s suddenly orphaned in a mining explosion that also leaves her wealthy, Helen Cespedes starts off as a crude, simple pumpkin, though one with native wiles that come in pretty handy soon enough, and ends up a Hollywood sophisticate who calls herself Masha Snow.  Throughout, however, she’s self-reliant, strong, oddly pure (even as she nearly gets roped into a “pornographic Valentine” scheme that she essentially turns to her own advantage), and true to herself.  Cespedes’s hillbilly miner comes off a little over-the-top, but since all the personas are caricatures and travesties anyway, this is a small cavil.  Opposite her is Creed Garnick’s Roscoe, the butterfly-chasing sissy ward of the brother-and-sister team of Uncle Oscar and Aunt Octobra Defoliant who’s about to be married off to a presumed heiress, the ludicrous and monumentally unattractive Miss Bee Sunshine (until Aunt Octobra discovers the fiancée doesn’t actually have any money!).  As Roscoe admits, he’s a devout coward but he’s devoted to movies and if some of Roscoe’s transformations seem inexplicable, Garnick, whose versatility seems boundless (he comes mighty close to Jefferson Mays’s turn as Montague Navarro in A Gentleman’s Guide To Love & Murder; see my report on 16 October 2014), executes them with panache and glee, papering over many a small defect in the writing. 

Mabel, too, is captivated by the movies and she and Roscoe spend all the ready cash she’s brought with her on them when she, too, becomes a ward of the Defoliants (to keep her around and happy, Aunt Octobra offers to subsidize her movie tickets).  The two cinephiles essentially learn about life by imitating the movie scenes they seem to channel.  But while Mabel transforms herself from rude bumpkin to Hollywood star, essentially taking on a new identity, it’s Garnick’s Roscoe who takes on the many disguises and temporary personas of, say, Chaplin in many of his films.  (Consider 1925’s Gold Rush, for instance, in which Chaplin played The Lone Prospector, who in turn played an explorer, waiter, valet, millionaire, dancer, and lover, among others.)  Some of Roscoe’s changes take place in view of us, so we get to witness his alteration.  (Mabel’s shift happens off stage, during the intermission.)  In performance, the main difference between the transformations is that Mabel’s is a change of character to a degree—Cespedes essentially plays two different ones, Mabel and Masha, even though her core remains unaltered—while Roscoe’s are merely disguises, so Garnick’s character remains visible throughout even as his role alters (however superficially—after all, this is a farce, not a tragicomedy!).  Both actors handle the demands flawlessly.

It’d be nearly impossible in a relatively short report to detail all the roles and characterizations handled by the four-actor ensemble, but I’ll spotlight a few, with the understanding that this selection is not a judgment of their quality.  Evan Zes starts off as Curley P. Curtis, Mabel’s uncle and the miner who dies discovering a rich strike in California that precipitates the events that follow.  Near the end of act one, Zes does a turn as a succession of women auditioning for that pornographic Valentine series.  (One reviewer affirms that this “is an actor having some serious fun with his roles.”)  He dons a series of outrageous costumes, revealing his masculine chest and muscular legs (think Corporal Klinger on MASH or the dancers of Les Ballets Trocadero de Monte Carlo), each more outré that the preceding one.  He’s also Masha’s mentor and director when she becomes a silent film star in act two and he’s as demanding as any fictional parody of von Stroheim while at the same time, (literally) madly in love with his creation.

Felicia Curry first shows up as Miss Bee Sunshine, Roscoe’s one-time fiancée, a grotesque with missing teeth, dressed in a preposterous yellow dress only a costume designer with a peculiar sense of humor could have devised.  She also embodies the pornographer’s rifle-slinging cowboy assistant (there must be something in the juxtaposition of a female actor in drag in the same scene as Zes’s female drag turn—but I can’t suss it out) with considerable swagger (all the more noticeable because Curry’s a small woman) and a panoply of other characters such as the film director’s angry wife.  (A quick note here: the supporting ensemble of Studio’s Laugh is the product of color-blind as well as gender-blind casting.  Just as women play men and vice versa, the roles aren’t assigned with any consciousness to race.  It’s simply irrelevant.)

As the Defoliants (named, I suppose, because their rapaciousness and greed operates at a scorched-earth level—but that’s just a guess), Jacob Ming-Trent and Emily Townley depict perhaps two of the most eccentric characters I’ve encountered on any stage in recent memory.  Ming-Trent, a portly man, never moves without an armchair attached to his butt (possibly a comment on “Fatty” Arbuckle who refused to perform roles in which his size—he, too, was a large man—was the source of humor, such as being stuck in a doorway or a chair).  Ming-Trent also appears as the pornographer, whom Mabel blackmails into becoming her butler in Hollywood, and later as a Hollywood dowager in the mold of Margaret Dumont.  (It’s he, not Townley, who seems to have channeled Groucho Marx’s foil.)  Townley’s Aunt Octobra  may be one of the nastiest villains on any current stage and the actress portrays her with a single-mindedness that suggests you don’t want to get in her sights.  She may be poisoning Uncle Oscar and she certainly intends to do away with the wealthy Mabel—after marrying her off to the now-eligible Roscoe.  Octobra’s demise comes when she starts scarfing down bon-bons, initially brought out for Roscoe to woo Mabel with, and accidentally swallows the diamond ring she gave her nephew to propose to Mabel with.  The look of realization on Townley’s face when she understands what’s happened—Roscoe, Mabel, and Oscar have all fled—is almost priceless.  Townley handles many other roles as well.

Schweizer keeps the proceedings moving apace, but they lack the sharp edges and split-second timing that this kind of slapstick parody needs to be really effective.  The director imparted the requisite style to his cast, and they seem to have gotten into the world of the play, but it's soft and mushy overall.  Schweizer, who’s directed both opera and performance art as well as theater for 40 years, should have the wherewithal to get this right, but he seems to have missed the bull’s-eye by several inches. 

In another nod to classic silent films, Henley includes a score of original piano music in her performance text for Laugh.  Composed and performed live on stage (albeit on the periphery of the action) by Wayne Barker (2012 Tony nomination and 2011 Drama Desk Award for his music for Peter and the Starcatcher), who also acts not so much as Narrator (as he’s credited in the program) than as a living title card announcing the time and settings or little labels for scenes, the music is so reminiscent of the accompaniment for the silents that I thought at first Barker was using existing music.  (According to the Washington Post, this gig came out of early readings of the play, presented last August at Vassar College’s New York Stage and Film’s Powerhouse Theater with Schweizer already in the director’s chair, and apparently stuck.  Assuming there are revivals of Laugh, I can’t imagine Barker himself will play them—except maybe a New York première.)  Barker’s playing and discontinuous patter helps keep Laugh flowing and smoothes over the gaps in the sometimes disjointed action.

Andromache Chalfant’s set, a changing but essentially unit environment that evokes the locales—the mine, the Defoliants’ rural home, the porn studio in the middle of nowhere, a train car, and so on—and still lets us imagine a silent-movie set, is open enough to permit plenty of movement, including pratfalls and a couple of stage fights (Joe Isenberg is the fight director and Elena Day is the movement consultant) on the Mead’s smallish stage.  (Set pieces are changed in view of the audience by stagehands who behave much like movie-set grips: noisily and unapologetically.)  Paired with Michael Lincoln’s lighting, the performance environment is effectively apt.  Add the often outrageous costumes of Frank Labovitz, of which Miss Bee Sunshine’s absurd yellow dress and Zes’s three crazy sex-worker outfits were standouts, and the look of Laugh is perhaps the best part of the whole show (with the possible exception of the acting). 

The press was decidedly mixed nearly across the board.  Nearly all the reviewers praised Henley’s invocation of the old movies and her revival of slapstick, but almost all of them also remarked that Laugh is episodic and disjointed, barely holding together as a play.  Headlines and subheads read “Equal parts funny and peculiar” (Washington Post) and “Though the laughs in Studio Theatre’s ‘Laugh’ may be strained at times, the quirky play is pleasant” (Washington Life Magazine).  The sentiment was just about universal.  The Post’s Pressley, for example, after reporting “zest in the wordplay and some brave over-the-top performances,” laments, “The absurdities don’t always cohere.”  Labeling the play “oddball,” Pressley adds, “The fussy throwback stagecraft feels as if it is jostling with Henley’s writing,”  and concludes, “It’s intriguing, and yes, there are real laughs.  But it all keeps hitting jarring potholes; it’s pretty peculiar.”

In the Washington City Paper, Chris Klimek, calling Laugh a “throwback” (a word Postman Pressley also used), describes the production as “a Muppety assemblage of outrageous zut alors! accents, awful fake beards, pendulous fake boobs, and cream-pies-in-faces.”  Schweizer’s Laugh is “staged and performed with a vigor and precision that frequently gels into a persuasive illusion of effortlessness,” continues Klimek in probably the area’s most positive notice, “and unless you’re an incurable sourpuss you’ll probably have a good time.”  (I guess that tells me, huh?)  The cast’s “energy never wanes, even when what seems like it would make a delightful 85-minute one-act stretches out to a mildly enervating two hours and 15 minutes.”   Chuck Conconi acknowledges in Washington Life Magazine that “without question, ‘Laugh’ is quirky, but in spite of all the pratfall antics, it is pleasant, but the laughs are often strained.”  Conconi concludes, “‘Laugh’ is disjointed, sometimes funny, sometimes strained” and that Schweizer’s “direction lacked the split-second timing necessary to take advantage of the play’s madcap demands.” 

On Examiner.com, Kyle Osborne labels Laugh “a love letter to pratfalls and props, to double-takes and dreams of Hollywood and striking it rich.  And pies in the face.”  Praising the performances and some of Schweizer’s and Henley’s bits, however, Osbourne reports, “But these bits of brilliance feel more like vignettes than a cohesive story, which makes it hard to get inside the proceedings.”  The cyber reviewer explains that the audience seemed more amused by “the meta tone” (by which I assume he’s referring to the recreation on a live stage of silent-movie scenes and business) and also observes (as did several other reporters) that pianist-composer-narrator Wayne Barker “may have gotten more laughs than anyone else onstage.”  Jayne Blanchard opens her review in DC Theatre Scene by stating that playwright Henley “slips on the banana peel trying to recreate the side-splitting in Laugh.”  Though she says, “It’s worthwhile to dodge the myriad potholes along P Street to take in Laugh,” the DCTS reviewer goes on to note that the “florid dialogue often sounds like it was composed with a calligraphy pen” and that the play “lurches along episodically” to the extent that it “doesn’t seem to know whether it wants to be a sendup or a stylistic experiment.”  Blanchard sums the experience up by asserting, “Aside from some daffy bits—and you don’t know whether to give credit to Henley or the cast’s demented inventiveness—Laugh is more strange than funny.”

MD Theatre Guide’s Roger Catlin warns that Studio’s première of Laugh is “not always a smooth road to laughter,” opining, “It almost feels like she’s trying anything that works after a while, and in comedy such perceived desperation can dry up the mirth.”  After a litany of ideas that don’t quite work, Catlin concludes, “Laugh is good for one or two, even if it strings things a bit too long.”  In the first paragraph of his DC Metro Theater Arts review, Robert Michael Oliver asserts that the play “elicits laughter, a good deal of it—nay, an excellent amount if the play were only 100 minutes long and tight as a pair of lips suppressing a laugh.”  Then he goes on, “Unfortunately, Henley’s new farce reaches 2 hours and has too much air, not enough invention, and way too many scene changes to gather any momentum.”  Oliver does back off slightly, though, to concede, “Now, none of this is to say that there isn’t a lot to like about Laugh,” naming the design team and the cast as high points, but then he comes back to complain, “What Laugh doesn’t have is the clarity and joy that a farce requires.”  The DCMTA review-writer finds that director Schweizer doesn’t pace the performance “quickly enough” but admits that “Laugh is a pleasant enough theatrical experience,” even though “you’ll find no humor-catharsis in” the production.

In the New York-based cyber press, Pamela Roberts writes on Broadway World that “Laugh, like a frontier tumbleweed, is a bit aimless, loosely formed and messy.”  Roberts expected “movement and pace to be at the forefront,” she explains, but found “the play is far more rooted in language.”  Describing the Studio production as “over-long” for something labeled “slapstick,” it “needs to be trimmed,” Roberts believes.  Nonetheless, given Henley’s talents for “heightened language and quirkiness,” the BWW reviewer acknowledges, “Laugh has some fine moments.”  On Talkin’ Broadway, Susan Berlin writes that Laugh “is a valentine to early cinema” that includes Henley’s “familiar way of finding humor in the outrageous” that Studio premières “with a sincere heart.”  Berlin expressly praised the “solidly entertaining and heartfelt performances,” especially of Cespedes and Garnick. 

I probably shouldn’t make predictions (I’m usually not good at them), but I’ll dare to say that if Laugh makes a move to New York off of this début, it won’t fare well.  One reason Henley (and others) sometimes première their new plays in small, out-of-the-limelight theaters (and that’s not a comment on their quality) is that it’s safer than a New York City preem (or even a Chicago, San Francisco, New Haven, or Cambridge opening) because, first, it’s less heavily scrutinized and, second, the press is kinder (that’s particularly true in comparison to New York City).  You can see that the Capital area reviewers weren’t well-disposed to Laugh; if you know the New York scene, you can imagine how our theater desks will cover the play.  (Personally, I can’t see why any major theater in New York would want to produce Laugh as it now stands.  My companions at Studio that Sunday afternoon asked the Big Question directly: why did David Muse, Studio’s artistic director, choose to put Laugh up at his troupe?  Did he read it and say, ‘I really have to do this play,’ they wondered.  Despite that response, however, he did, and some AD in the Big Apple might make the same decision—because it’s a Beth Henley script, a new play, an actors’ play, or any other nonce rationale.)  Should any theater present Henley’s play, without substantial rewrites and—sorry, Schweizer—a change of director, it’ll get lambasted in the reviews and disappoint audiences and subscribers in droves.  (It may be revealing that several Studio spectators left at intermission and I heard others contemplating that choice.)  The author said she needed to write the play essentially to decompress from her previous effort.  Well, now she has.  I hope it worked for her, because I don’t think it’ll have much of a stage life after its Washington run.  If I were a betting man . . . .

Beth Henley and 'Ridiculous Fraud'

by Kirk Woodward

[Frequent ROT guest-blogger Kirk Woodward this time contributes a rumination on the dramaturgy of Mississippi-born playwright Beth Henley, focusing in particular on her 2007 play, Ridiculous Fraud.  Aside from a discussion of the play itself, which Kirk believes is underappreciated by critics and theater artists alike, Kirk, a playwright himself and a native of Louisville, Kentucky, also examines what it means to be a “Southern playwright.”  As I usually promise in my prefaces to Kirk’s ROT postings, I know you’ll find his remarks informative and provocative.  ~Rick]

Some time ago I was invited to write an article about the playwright Beth Henley (born in 1952). The project never got past the draft stage, but it did introduce me to Henley’s plays. In particular, it introduced me to a play I think deserves more attention than it’s gotten, so I’m going to do my bit for it here. 

Beth Henley was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1952. She is often referred to as a “Southern playwright.” Most, but not all, of Henley’s plays are set in the South, including the majority of works in her two volumes of Collected Plays, and two later plays, Ridiculous Fraud (2007) and The Jacksonian (2013). (Her most recent play, Laugh, first produced in 2014 and scheduled for its premiere by the Studio Theatre of Washington, D.C., in March 2015, seems not to be specifically related to the South.) Her best known plays, both of which have been turned into movies, are Crimes of the Heart (1978) and The Miss Firecracker Contest (1984), both, again, set in the South. 

I was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, and when I was growing up, the idea of “regional playwriting” interested me. How would a play that reflected, say, life in Louisville differ from any other play, other than in its setting? That’s not to say that there was much regional drama around to experience at the time. Kermit Hunter (1910-2001) wrote one of his “symphonic dramas,” Bound for Kentucky (1961) for the city of Louisville, but it wasn’t a success. My father admired and introduced me to Marc Connelly’s The Green Pastures (1930), a lovely play that tells the story of the Old Testament in what would then have been called Negro dialect – but Connelly was from Pennsylvania, and for decades Pastures has been impractical to mount, so I (and most people today) have never seen it. As for Tennessee Williams, he was only a slightly disreputable name to me while I was growing up. 

Today the situation has changed, and the South in particular is associated with a number of playwrights. Williams, Horton Foote (a Texan, actually), and Marsha Norman (from Louisville, Kentucky) come to mind; another is Beth Henley. What does it mean, exactly, to be a “Southern” playwright? We can try to answer that question while looking at Henley’s play Ridiculous Fraud, both because it provides a good basis for a discussion of what makes a play “regional,” and because I think it’s a worthwhile play, much more interesting and worthy of production than one would guess from its history and, in general, reviews. 

About the play: Ridiculous Fraud takes place in Louisiana. Its action moves from the family home in New Orleans, to a farmhouse in the backwoods, to a cabin deep in the swamp, hidden from civilization, and then, at the end, back to New Orleans, not to the crowded part of the city but to a cemetery. The plot of the play is a little complicated. In Act One Scene One, which takes place in the summertime, the Clay family, including brothers Andrew and Kap; Andrew’s wife, Willow; and their uncle, Baites (who has picked up Georgia, a one-legged homeless woman, that same day) are reacting to the collapse of the wedding of the youngest brother, Lefcad, who ran away before the ceremony. Lefcad turns up, and, scared that he’ll get beaten to a pulp for his cowardice, runs away again. Scene Two, set in the fall, finds Lefcad hiding out in his uncle Baites’s cabin, surrounded by plenty of other family turmoil: Willow is having an affair, Baites’s girlfriend seems to be robbing him, and nobody likes Andrew. 

Act Two Scene One finds the family still deeper in the woods, in Kap’s cabin. Georgia has left Baites. Kap and Andrew taunt him about it, Andrew accidentally stabs Lefcad with an arrow and has a fistfight with Kap, who also gets his face cut with a knife by Willow’s father. In Scene Two the family, gathered at its cemetery plot after the death of the brothers’ father, finds that Georgia has returned to Baites, Willow’s affair is over, Andrew has learned a bit of humility, and the brothers seem more determined to tolerate each other. Even Lefcad seems to be in a better mood. 

I wonder how this plot summary will strike someone reading about the play for the first time. Obviously I’m leaving out many details, but my description probably makes it clear why Henley’s plays are sometimes described as “gothic,” which can be critical shorthand for “violent.” I hope my summary also gives an idea of the complexity of the story and the importance of the relationships in it. What I can’t summarize quickly is the quality of the experience of the play, so I’ll try to describe that. 

First, though, about the history of Ridiculous Fraud: It was first performed at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, New Jersey, from May 5 through June 11, 2006. Later that same year, in November, it was performed in Costa Mesa, California. I haven’t found evidence of any other productions of the play, and the reviews for these two were mixed to poor, including the New York Times, where Charles Isherwood called it “confused… all cracks and precious little comedy” (May 16, 2006). On the other hand, Naomi Siegel (in the Sunday Times) did call it “splendidly acted and directed . . . an affirmation of Family with a capital F” (May 21, 2006). Similarly divided reviews greeted the Costa Mesa, California, production, and in general the play’s reception seems to have been grim. Emily Mann, the Artistic Director of the McCarter Theatre, wrote me in an email: “I think Beth is an authentic southern voice and except for a couple of her plays, northerners don’t get it. I love this play . . . It was in some ways a rocky first production with some cast problems so I think we would have gotten much further with the production if that had not been true.”  

I haven’t seen the play in performance. Just from reading it, though, I feel it more than deserves a further look. I find the elements of the play both interesting and deeply dramatic.  

First, something about the title. I’m not certain it’s appropriate, although Fraud does include an element of literal fraud – the unseen father of the family has gone to jail for it. There are definitely metaphorical elements of fraud – that is, deception or self-deception – in the actions of the three brothers, Lefcad, Andrew, and Kap, whose lives form the center of the drama. What I’m not sure about is how the term “ridiculous” applies to the mounting complexity of the relationships of the three brothers and their wives and in-laws, as they attempt to navigate their unfortunate family dynamics that drive them, both symbolically and literally, deeper and deeper into a dark woods, and ultimately to a cemetery, possibly the loneliest setting of all. The characters have ridiculous aspects to them, I suppose; but they and the play are by no means silly. 

Where does Ridiculous Fraud fit in the realm of dramaturgy? For any Southern playwright, comparisons with Tennessee Williams are inevitable; we seem to hear the cadences of Williams’ dialogue, for example, in this speech from another of Henley’s plays, Lucky Spot: 

An extravaganza! This was supposed to be an extravaganza! Instead it’s a farce, it’s a flop. A dream so shattered I can’t even remember what the pieces are.  

But Ridiculous Fraud brings one earlier playwright in particular to mind. It’s not the one I think of in connection with Henley’s better known plays Crimes of the Heart and The Miss Firecracker Contest. Those both tell a more or less straightforward story, in the course of which at least one major secret is revealed. That’s a pattern of drama associated with the later “social” plays of the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), and an extremely influential pattern in drama today – a climax in which something deeply hidden comes to light. This kind of dramatic device has been central to Western drama at least since the social plays of Ibsen were first performed; it informs the plays of writers as different as Eugene O’Neill and Noel Coward, and of course is a staple of television drama as well. 

Secrets are also revealed in Fraud, but not in the sense of startling revelation as much as of a developing understanding of the characters, as the action of the play carries them increasingly further into the murky places of personality. Secrets imply history, and the South is a land tightly linked to history, retaining memories of its formative years, of the Civil War, and of the period following that stretches all the way to today. Much of the resonance of Henley’s plays comes from a sense that history exists in close relationship with the present.  

The playwright that Ridiculous Fraud brings primarily to mind is the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov (1860-1904). The form of Fraud is Chekhovian – definitely an American version of it, but still, like many of Chekhov’s mature plays, a family portrait, in which the events of the play do not overshadow the significance of the family unit itself, including the family’s comic elements and its inability to advance itself in the way it feels it ought.  

The Chekhovian tone in Fraud is unmistakable: 

I can’t believe I’ve lied to him. My own brother. Everything’s falling apart. I’ve been lying. I’m not a liar; so it’s impossible. But love makes you do the things you do. 

Fraud tells a story unified by a movement from assumptions to reality. The characters make assumptions about themselves and their worlds, and they attempt to force those assumptions on others, but in the end they find that reality imposes different conclusions. This pattern also can be labeled Chekhovian. The resolutions of the play are not completely beneficent or healing, any more than it is in Chekhov’s major plays. But in general, Henley’s characters tend to retain at least a bit of hope as they move into the clearer realities of their futures, and as a result these plays may be categorized in some sense as comedies, bittersweet comedies, or semi-comedies. However, the movement from assumption to reality in these plays is arduous, and the realities are none too comforting. All these comments can be applied to Chekhov’s plays as well. 

Writers, it is frequently said, write about what they know. (Henley set her more recent play The Jacksonians in the town where she grew up.) One may be tempted to say that Henley’s plays criticize, or even make fun of, the South. This view is not necessarily fair. Any playwright is going to choose difficult moments to write about – that’s the nature of the art. Just because a play presents a particular group of people in a conflict situation, may not imply an unfavorable opinion; no one thinks of Hamlet as a critique of the Danes. A playwright may set a drama in a particular region, not for the purpose of criticizing that region, but for the purpose of using it to emphasize the humanity of its truths. I would say that Henley is writing about conflict among characters she has imagined, using whatever instruments are available to her, including locale, characterization, ways of speaking, and so on. In other words, she’s not a reporter but an imaginative artist.  

In Ridiculous Fraud Beth Henley does make its regional – in this case, Southern – character clear. Beginning with the obvious, the Southern settings of Henley’s plays give an occasion for colorful names that appear to be more likely to be encountered in the South than elsewhere: Lafcad, Willow, Kap, Georgia, and the child affectionately (perhaps) known as Little Butterball. Fraud is full of telling social details related to what we may assume is life in the deep South, like a practical joke in the play that involves “eating a bug,” or the duck hunts that Kap stages for people with money who want the primal feeling of hunting. We hear people refer to “Daddy” and “red neck bubba.”  

The South is not shown as a necessarily poor environment. However, the physical South that Henley portrays is not a financially upbeat area like the Atlanta suburbs, but a more primal area, less protected by social conventions, more representative of basic emotions. The family home we see in Act One of Fraud is genteel, although definitely not lavish. But the backwoods farmhouse in Act Two is a basic sort of structure, and Kap’s cabin in the woods in Act Three is downright primitive. This progression of settings suggests a reality in the play that becomes increasingly gritty. (Race relations however are only peripherally present in the play, as in a casual comment that Lefcad, the brother who fled his own wedding, will probably be “lynched.” Henley isn’t preaching about social problems. However, she is clearly aware of them.) 

Poverty is by no means unique to the South, but setting the play in that locale does add complexity to the social background in the sense that having almost no money may not be a barrier to social acceptance, as shown in the way Andrew is trying to win respect for his family through his political career. A character can be down at heel and still hope for social redemption and a return to an assumed deserved station in society. The importance of family is another significant social element in the plays under consideration. In many areas of the South, family can be a defining characteristic both of individual identity and of social standing. In Fraud the father is in jail, and as noted Andrew wants to raise the family’s prestige by running for State Auditor. If his family problems provide him with a goal, they also give him his burden, since no one else in the family, including but not limited to his father, behaves in any way like a model citizen. In particular his brother Lefcad, scheduled to be married to a woman he doesn’t love, abandons her at the altar and hides out with the family. “I must hold this family all together myself without glue,” Andrew says, but he can’t. 

Much of the energy, and the comedy, in Henley’s plays come from the unsuitability of family members for each other. She presents the South as a place where eccentricity can seem normal. Many of her characters simply seem unsuited for their chosen tasks. In Fraud we meet a duck hunter inept at shooting ducks, a bridegroom who is possibly homosexual, and a new girlfriend who seems to have no history and no trace of dependability. Some reviewers have suggested that Henley arbitrarily places her characters in inappropriate roles that they would not assume in real life. On the other hand, it may be the case that in the more marginal areas of the country, round pegs do not always have to fit into round holes. A relaxed social atmosphere may make it possible for people to exist for years in ways of living that are unsuitable for them. Henley’s characters frequently are not only unsuited for their states of being by their interests and ambitions, but also by their personal characteristics. The backgrounds of many characters include behavior that is worse than eccentric, but in fact is close to dangerous and destructive, as shown by the violence in Fraud. 

Every family has a history. In Fraud an important family member (the father) is in jail, to the distress and embarrassment of the others. That’s a major part of the family’s history. Behind family specifics, forming a background, is the history of the South, which Henley indirectly, by reference and evocation, in the sense of decline and decay that surrounds the characters, and the sense that something more worthwhile used to exist and that now “the storm’s coming.” There are suggestions that the past was more glorious, and that its remnants exist today, for example in the code of revenge that Ed feels he must follow when he cuts Kap’s face over Kap’s involvement with his wife, a sort of half-remembered code of honor. But those remnants are isolated, floating in space; they are not part of an intelligible code but strange survivals of a previous and more primal era that can now hardly be understood. 

A sign of the hollowness of history in Henley’s plays is the pretenses of her characters. A major motivation in many of her plays is the desire to seem different than one really is – in particular, to seem more socially prominent than one is, as if social prominence could somehow make up for a damaged past. Henley’s characters frequently let the past drive their behavior, rather than learning to live in the moment as much as possible. That past is often presented as problematic, yet it shapes the present, often in destructive ways. This kind of presentation of the hand of history on the life of people of today is surely easier to dramatize in a setting soaked in history like the South. Henley uses the tradition-remembering, family-linked South to evoke how heavy the hand of the past can be. 

On the other hand, a prominent characteristic of Henley’s characters is that in the face of grievous and overwhelming difficulty, they retain hope for a better existence. The family in Fraud that wants to hold up its name goes from bad to worse. Still the characters dream of and plan for a future. Obviously hope is not always realistic. The family in Fraud is not notably benefited by Andrew’s success in politics, which seems to have been made possible by voter indifference more than widespread acceptance of the family. But love, or what passes for love, can and often does bring hope, even if that hope is not likely to be realized. 

Why do people continue to fight and strive for a happy life against overwhelming odds? Henley’s play raises this question but doesn’t answer it. Instead it leads us to look at the mystery that lies behind our refusals to accept defeat and give up entirely. The play’s shadowy settings, like the forest where Kap’s cabin is located in Fraud, hint of mystery, and life at its heart, Henley seems to suggest, is most definitely a mystery. Mystery is mystery because it offers no pat answers. It may lead to confusion and bewilderment. It may lead to Andrew’s bewildered sense in Fraud that life is a dream. Sometimes, though, it may also lead to rebirth, as in the sense of giddiness pervades the last scene of Fraud despite all the disaster and the literal presence of death in the graveyard where the family has gathered. In the midst of death, we are somehow in life. We keep going. 

I hope this look at Ridiculous Fraud makes it clear why I think the play deserves further attention. I think the South provides a rich and useful background for a playwright who wants to capture the varied and contradictory natures of individuals struggling with the mysteries of life. Other geographic or cultural areas perhaps offer similar opportunities for a playwright; as already noted, Henley has written plays set in other areas of the United States. But the South, with its rich history and its evocative spaces, offers unique opportunities for a playwright like Beth Henley to give us provocative evocations of the strangeness of our existence. 

[Kirk’s last contributions to ROT are “Bertolt Brecht and the Mental Health Players,” posted on 21 October, and “Bullets Over Bullets Over Broadway,” 29 August.  He also has some work in progress for upcoming postings, so come back often to catch his latest.]