KCAT’s Crimes of the Heart goes down easy

It was a snowy day when I saw Crimes of the Heart, but what I wanted when I left the show was a tall, cold glass of lemonade — tart, with lots of sugar, just the way they take it in the play. And I would have drunk it down with these characters in their kitchen, where their conversations, arguments and antics play out.

Set in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, more than three decades ago, Beth Henley’s play, with its drawling speech, banging screen door and relaxed pace, is a lot like that summertime refresher, pairing an easy Southern comfort with a few Southerners’ flaws and dark moods.

Henley’s Southern gothic won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for drama, but it first found favor at Louisville’s Festival of New American Plays in the late ’70s, when the playwright was an up-and-coming talent. (She later adapted the play for a 1986 movie.) It has been revived in recent years, and Kansas City Actors Theatre closes its 10th season with a production at Johnson County Community College’s Polsky Theatre.

Written in three acts, Crimes is here collapsed into two, making for a nearly 90-minute first half. At times languorous, the lengthy play still holds us with fluid, engaging dialogue, and well-delineated and offbeat characters who are trying to make sense not just of one particularly bad day (the progress of which is beautifully imparted by Shane Rowse’s lighting) but also of their lives.

The three idiosyncratic sisters at the core of this humorous “tragicomedy,” directed here by Darren Sextro, share memories and a blood bond that don’t quite obscure old sibling resentments. Henley’s script blends the rivalries and secrets underlying family connections with a sentimentality that makes the play more sweet than sour.

Lenny (Melinda McCrary) is celebrating her birthday alone when the show begins, placing a single candle on a single cookie and relighting it over and over to make a series of wishes. She’s the one who has remained home to look after an ailing grandfather while her sisters moved on with their lives. Raised by grandparents after their father’s abandonment and their mother’s scandalous suicide, the grown women are about to be reunited. The more worldly Meg (Manon Halliburton) has been off in Hollywood — a location made funny just by McCrary’s utterance of the word — to pursue a singing career. And the naïve Babe (Cinnamon Schultz) has landed in jail — a place she says has been “a relief” — after shooting her husband, making for one more newspaper clipping to add to the family scrapbook, and one more disgrace to horrify their flighty first cousin, Chick (Jan Rogge), who seems more concerned with social standing.

The actors at the center of this story — all excellent — are well-served by the script, despite their parts originally being conceived as younger than depicted here. (Henley’s Lenny, for instance, observes a 30th birthday, not a 50th.) They so immerse themselves in their roles that it doesn’t take long to forget their familiar identities and be taken in completely by the fictional Lenny, Meg, Babe and Chick. Also very good in supporting roles are Coleman Crenshaw, as Barnette Lloyd, Babe’s young, well-educated attorney; and David Fritts, as Doc Porter, Meg’s old flame.

But some plot points just don’t jibe with middle-aged versions of the main characters (a dried-up ovary, for instance, that could impede fertility and, thus, a budding relationship, or the script’s 11 years that have transpired since Meg, after high school, ran off from her now-married and now-graying former lover. Also, a lingering jealousy over how many jingle bells a sister got on her skirt as a child seems less likely some 30 years on.

This casting, if in lieu of narrative logic, provides an ideal platform for this talented ensemble. It also adds a depth that might not otherwise exist in this largely light work, and another layer to these eccentric characters as they carry on, their kinship intact and their foibles in tow.