Crimes of the Heart ★★★★

It’s a mighty fine delight to see Beth Henley‘s Pulitzer-winning Crimes of the Heart back on a New York stage. The Magrath sisters from Mississippi — Lenny, Meg, and Babe — should really drop by more often, and Red Door Productions‘ revival, directed by Eve Bianco, is a mostly satisfying return visit, even if it doesn’t fully capture the play’s quirky Southern Gothic mix of comedy and darkness.

Set over the course of 24 hours in their grandparents’ Mississippi kitchen, Crimes of the Heart follows three distanced sisters who are forced back together after the youngest, Babe, shoots her husband because she “didn’t like his looks.” Once reunited, they have no choice but to reckon with old grudges, a complicated family history, and each other.

Not a sassy knock on the production, but the impressive scenic design by Roxane Pes is the show’s biggest success. The single kitchen set — stove, sink, refrigerator, obligatory screen door, and all — does a lot of heavy lifting on what was surely a modest budget. Within seconds, we’re planted firmly in Hazlehurst, Mississippi; you can practically smell the magnolia.

The performances are a more uneven story. Oddly, for a play built around three sisters, it’s the supporting cast that comes out ahead of the leads — and more strikingly, in a story about women navigating a world that keeps failing them, it’s the two men in the company — an outrageously charismatic Ronan Schwarz as Doc Porter, one of Meg’s former beaus, and a perfectly aw-shucks Luke Kissick as Barnette Lloyd, Babe’s lawyer — who leave the strongest impression. That’s not a slight on the three fine actresses at the center (Jacqueline Byrne, Ana Radice-Morras, and Violet Levinson as Lenny, Meg, and Babe, respectively) or the hilarious Branwyn Ritchie as their officious cousin Chick so much as a sign the production hasn’t quite balanced its ensemble.

Pacing is the production’s biggest obstacle, particularly in the first act. There’s a persistent tendency to let Southern speech patterns slow things down, but these are characters in the grip of very real, very immediate crises. Southern doesn’t always mean slow (think George Clooney in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, or Julie White in Six Feet Under), and here it costs the play momentum right when it needs urgency.

Some of the smaller staging choices don’t hold up under scrutiny either. Babe’s lemonade-making is a good example: she whips up a pitcher early on with barely a thought at the process, but later in the play she describes, in detail, exactly how she makes it — a description that doesn’t match what we watched her do minutes before.

Another example: the act break. Henley wrote the play in three acts; this production compresses everything into two, and the created transition between the first two acts plays out in total darkness and dead silence. Some music under that blackout could have carried the audience’s momentum through the gap and deepened our sense of the world we’re about to return to. Instead, the awkward quiet leaves time for minds to wander.

And then there’s Babe herself, whose sanity is one of the play’s central open questions. The other characters spend much of the play debating whether she’s unraveling or clear-eyed. To add to the mystery, Babe herself treats the imminent prospect of prison almost like a lark, telling Meg not to worry because jail’s “gonna be a relief to me,” since she’ll finally have time to take up the saxophone. This production settles the sanity question far too early, though. As played here, Babe reads as pretty darn sane from her first entrance, which drains some of the tension the script is built to sustain.

None of this sinks the production. The design is lovely, the play itself is as sturdy and surprising as ever, and there’s real pleasure in watching these sisters wrestle with each other and their own history. But between the pacing, a few unfinished directorial ideas, and a Babe who never seems quite as unmoored as she needs to, this Crimes of the Heart lands as a good production of a great play rather than a great production in its own right.