The Jacksonian

Geffen Playhouse Los Angeles

(310) 208-5454

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Each of the characters in Beth Henley’s latest slice of Southern Gothic “has more than one screw loose,” said Bob Verini in Variety. A “low-keyed but chilling display of everyday psychopathology,” this crafty offering from the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer of 1979’s Crimes of the Heart could very well have been called “Crimes of the Mind.” Set in a seedy Jackson, Miss., motel in 1964, it introduces seemingly ordinary people who, through a “series of casually chatty encounters,” prove themselves more and more deranged. Even Rosy (Bess Rous), the hunchbacked teenage narrator, comes to seem “one can short of a six-pack” as she rambles on about how she wants a wheelchair for Christmas because she hates walking.

Rosy is relatively benign compared with her adult counterparts, said Charles McNulty in the Los Angeles Times. A “tonally perfect” Ed Harris plays her father, a dentist with “a slightly sinister white-collar demeanor” who is living at the hotel after leaving his wife, a character brought to life with “delectable neurotic panache” by Harris’s real spouse, Amy Madigan. Meanwhile, Rosy is unaware that she’s being ogled by the motel’s bartender, who knows far more about a recent murder than the black man who may be lynched because of it. As the latent insanity in all of them becomes explicit, Henley’s characters behave in increasingly bizarre ways, giving the play “dizzying momentum.”

“Many playgoers are likely to get lost,” said Tanner Stransky in Entertainment Weekly. Rosy’s soliloquies are intended to stitch the story together, but her “creepy, dramatic speeches only serve to confuse matters.” Fortunately, “the performances are brilliant,” from Bill Pullman’s unhinged barkeep to Rous’s scene-stealing Rosy. Even so, “this is Ed Harris’s show,” said Paul Hodgins in the Orange County, Calif., Register. His turn as Rosy’s drug-addled and delusionary dad gradually grows in complexity until he becomes “a tragic character of Willy Loman proportions.” He and the rest of the cast “keep even the play’s wildest moments mesmerizing.”