Post by petrolino on Sept 15, 2018 20:56:13 GMT
Playwright Beth Henley was born May 8, 1952, Jackson, Mississippi. In the 1980s, she was in a relationship with character actor Stephen Tobolowsky who's also a writer. She's had many plays produced on stage and written for the movies. If you see her out, she often looks like she's been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. I really like her stuff I've seen, I recommend it.
"Some crucial details elude her, but what Beth Henley remembers clearly about the violent death of Kathy Ainsworth, her sister’s fifth-grade teacher, is the short shorts.
“She was with the K.K.K., but I don’t know who shot her or why,” Ms. Henley recalled in a recent interview at Geffen Playhouse here, where her new play, “The Jacksonian,” opens next month. “I just know that it was up on my sister’s bulletin board — a news report that her teacher had been shot in hot pants.”
An eye for the jarringly comic detail in the midst of cruelty or depravity, for the tinsel on the trash heap, has been Ms. Henley’s stock in trade since this playwright, born in Jackson, Miss., emerged more than three decades ago with “Crimes of the Heart” and “The Miss Firecracker Contest.” If, since then, audiences and critics have often dismissed her studied quirkiness as cutesy Southern-gothic shtick, “The Jacksonian,” which stars Ed Harris and Amy Madigan, is likely to change that.
The first of Ms. Henley’s 16 full-length plays to be set in her own hometown, “The Jacksonian” isn’t directly inspired by the dramatic real-life story of Ainsworth, a schoolteacher killed by the police in 1968 while helping her boyfriend, who was affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, to bomb a Jewish leader’s home in nearby Meridian, Miss. Its violence may in fact be informed as much by the unrelated, more recent murders of Ms. Henley’s own loved ones.
But this exceptionally dark, fragmented new play does represent her most sustained effort yet to face the convulsive, contradictory South she was raised in, a bewildering place of alternating gentility and savagery, where efforts at racial integration stirred a backlash at least as terrible as the segregation it rose to defend."
“She was with the K.K.K., but I don’t know who shot her or why,” Ms. Henley recalled in a recent interview at Geffen Playhouse here, where her new play, “The Jacksonian,” opens next month. “I just know that it was up on my sister’s bulletin board — a news report that her teacher had been shot in hot pants.”
An eye for the jarringly comic detail in the midst of cruelty or depravity, for the tinsel on the trash heap, has been Ms. Henley’s stock in trade since this playwright, born in Jackson, Miss., emerged more than three decades ago with “Crimes of the Heart” and “The Miss Firecracker Contest.” If, since then, audiences and critics have often dismissed her studied quirkiness as cutesy Southern-gothic shtick, “The Jacksonian,” which stars Ed Harris and Amy Madigan, is likely to change that.
The first of Ms. Henley’s 16 full-length plays to be set in her own hometown, “The Jacksonian” isn’t directly inspired by the dramatic real-life story of Ainsworth, a schoolteacher killed by the police in 1968 while helping her boyfriend, who was affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, to bomb a Jewish leader’s home in nearby Meridian, Miss. Its violence may in fact be informed as much by the unrelated, more recent murders of Ms. Henley’s own loved ones.
But this exceptionally dark, fragmented new play does represent her most sustained effort yet to face the convulsive, contradictory South she was raised in, a bewildering place of alternating gentility and savagery, where efforts at racial integration stirred a backlash at least as terrible as the segregation it rose to defend."
- Rob Weinert-Kendt, The New York Times
Beth Henley & Jonathan Demme
Beth Henley & Holly Hunter
