Maskers capture Magraths Audience feels, laughs at Belfast troupe’s ‘Crimes of the Heart’

BELFAST – Lenny Magrath is having a bad day.

Her little sister Babe’s in jail for shooting her husband, her singing sister Meg’s somewhere in Hollywood without a phone, her granddaddy’s in the hospital with blood vessels popping in his head and not a one of them has remembered that today is Lenny’s 39th birthday.

That’s how Beth Henley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Crimes of the Heart” opens. And it only gets more complicated when the Magrath sisters gather in the kitchen to deal with a family crisis that started years ago the day their mama hung herself and the family cat in the basement.

Mama was having a bad day too.

“Crimes of the Heart” may sound like a downer, but it is one of the funniest plays about sisterhood ever written. In the hands of the Belfast Maskers, it is uproarious and tender at the same time.

Although set in Hazlehurst, Miss., director Lorraine Brown serves up enough universal family angst to delight even a Yankee audience.

This is the second production the Maskers have staged in their renovated space. The intimate three-quarter-round setting makes theatergoers feel like they are peering over the back fence and peeking in the windows to spy on those wild and weird Magrath women.

Brown’s light touch as a director is barely visible. This production looks like she turned her cast loose on the script, then roped and reined them in a little. Like a fine cook, she lets the pot simmer and bubble, threatening to boil over, but never letting her actors fly over the edge. The Magrath women are, after all, just a little nuts, they aren’t totally crazy.

Deb Derecktor is Meg, the middle sister, the one who got out of town to pursue a singing career in California. Derecktor brings to the part a driving energy and hunger for life that is the pulsating heart of Henley’s story. Derecktor’s Meg is selfish and self-absorbed on the one hand, giving and insightful on the other, and the first to stand up and fight for her family.

Derecktor is so comfortable with Henley’s Southern culture, she wears it like a glove. She does not act the part of Meg, she inhabits her for the duration of the play. When the final blackout comes, Meg is the sister theatergoers want to go home with.

The husband-maiming Babe is played by Julia Olson. Her Babe appears flighty and airy in the way pretty women have masked their inner strength and resolve from men for centuries. Olson walks a very delicate balance between the madness that took her mother and the practical need to be rid of an abusive husband.

To the actress’s credit, the audience is never quite sure which drove Babe to pull the trigger. Olson also never reveals whether Babe knowingly seduces the young lawyer hired to defend her or whether he just gets sucked into that whirlwind called the Magrath women. It is this subtlety that makes her performance so fine.

Leslie Stein does not achieve the same naturalism in her character, Lenny, as do her “sisters.” Unfortunately, Stein’s hard work shows. It is not that Stein gives a bad performance. She poignantly portrays Lenny’s shyness and her selfless devotion to the family at the expense of her own happiness.

Stein is just not as experienced an actress as Olson and Derecktor. She never captures the steaming passion that Lenny has buried so deep for so long. Lenny cannot light that passion alone without her sisters. It is unfortunate that the actress portraying her can’t seem to light it all.

Chick Boyle is the busybody first cousin who lives next door and has always looked down her nose at the Magrath sisters. Lisa Goodridge is perfect as the whiny, demanding, self-righteous, gossipy cousin. Her voice sets theatergoers’ teeth on edge just at the right moment, and when Chick gets her comeuppance, the audience cheers Goodridge’s performance.

There are two men who must negotiate their way through this sea of women – Doc Porter, the love of Meg’s life, and Barnette Lloyd, Babe’s lawyer with a vendetta. Doc is one of the most underwritten parts in modern theater. Only an actor of incredible charisma and experience can make an impact in this role. Peter Conant tries and almost succeeds as Doc, the moth drawn to the flame named Meg Magrath.

Woodruff A. Gaul brings a youthful energy to the role of Barnette that Henley may not have intended. Immediately, he is smitten with Babe and, in the end, willing to make a gentlemanly sacrifice for her. Yet, Gaul finds in Barnette the same fire that burns inside each of the Magrath women. The young actor finally brings the sisters a man who understands them.

Dudley Zopp’s set is every kitchen, in every old house, in every small town in America. Donna Short’s lighting design works well in the tight space. The heat from the lights, however, does spill onto much of the audience. By the end of the first act, theatergoers in the first few rows are almost as warm as the actors are.

With each production, the Maskers are proving that the switch from a proscenium stage was a wise and long overdue one. Brown and her cast make the audience laugh and think and feel at the same moment.

Theater just doesn’t get much better than this.