For her newest play, ‘Ridiculous Fraud’ – having its world premiere at McCarter Theatre Center – playwright Beth Henley focuses on brothers.
By: Hilary Parker
What you see is what you get with Beth Henley. Perfectly comfortable posing for photographs in a gray, oversized sweatshirt, Ms. Henley is a playwright with an honest, realistic approach to life. Able to recognize the comedic and the tragic in everyday life, she also possesses a singular handle on depicting the dark humor of the day-to-day in her plays a talent that has garnered numerous accolades, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for her Mississippi-based tale of three sisters, Crimes of the Heart.
With Ridiculous Fraud, a play commissioned by McCarter Theatre that will make its world premiere on the Berlind Stage May 5 to June 11, Ms. Henley returns to her Southern roots in a bittersweet saga of three brothers in New Orleans. Set five years before Hurricane Katrina, the story is told in four acts each functioning like a one-act play subtly united through character movement and theme.
"Ridiculous fraud, to me, it’s sort of a worldview of life," Ms. Henley says in a breathy voice, slight twinges of a Southern accent revealing her Mississippi roots. "It is a ridiculous fraud, but that isn’t such a bad thing in the end; it’s kind of beautiful."
She’s been hard at work on the play for five years, pieces of it coming together by chance; a conversation here, an observation there. After her first work session at McCarter a few years back, the only part of the play she had finalized was that it would portray three brothers, one a duck hunter. On the drive to the airport, Ms. Henley heard the story of a McCarter intern’s mother who had been incarcerated for white-collar crime, and thus was born the idea to imprison the brothers’ father for fraud.
When a man named Laurence told her that "some people call me Larry, but I’m not a Larry," it struck Ms. Henley as so funny that she had to include it in the play in an explanation by the youngest brother, Lafcad, of how he came about his name: "Originally my mother gave me the name Laurence but everyone, I don’t know why, started calling me ‘Larry.’ Do I look like a ‘Larry’?" Quirky details and comic anecdotes, like a family tradition of forcing members to eat bugs when they "got too know-it-all-uppity," are peppered throughout the play, offering a humorous seasoning on a sometimes heart-wrenching main course.
While Ms. Henley revisits past plays in the setting of Ridiculous Fraud, in many ways the play is a departure from her previous works. Now that she’s the proud mother of a 10-year-old boy, she wanted to write a play about men.
"They’re allowed a violence that women aren’t allowed," she says. "It’s more honest than all the subterfuge." She herself has three sisters and no brothers, but that didn’t prove to be a problem: the imagination is a powerful thing.
While she’s often written pieces with a distinct time parameter a 24-hour period or the duration of a The Miss Firecracker Contest Ridiculous Fraud stretches from season to season. And, though she always tries to rework her plays with input from directors and actors, she enjoyed the luxury of an even more intense collaboration with director Lisa Peterson through a three-week-long workshop at the Sundance Theatre Laboratory in Utah in 2004.
The process of rehearsing the play every other day gave Ms. Henley time to incorporate the eight actors’ suggestions on inconsistencies they found in their characters or confusion they had over motives, and the simple approach she and Ms. Peterson took to Ridiculous Fraud during the workshop was entirely focused on the text.
"The play is kind of about mystery," says Ms. Henley, one side of her mouth turning up in a half-smile, "so you have to be very clear about it." Even now, Ms. Henley is making changes to the script as it is rehearsed at McCarter, and she’ll continue to do so, right through the previews. Truth is, Ms. Henley never really feels like she’s done with a play. She says she even wanted to make changes to her Pulitzer Prize-winner when she saw it directed by Garry Hynes at Second Stage in 2001.
For better or worse (better, judging from the reviews), she lets her plays go once they’re published. That doesn’t mean she stops worrying about them, though. For all her accolades, her success on screen (she received an Academy Award nomination for her adapted screenplay of Crimes of the Heart and wrote the well-reviewed Nobody’s Fool) and stage, Ms. Henley still describes opening night as "terrifying."
Even though she sees life as "a ridiculous fraud" and is one of the most well-respected of modern playwrights, Beth Henley is subject to stage fright. In something like an anecdote straight out of a play she might have written, Ms. Henley describes slinking backstage at intermission, avoiding the public restroom lest she overhear negative comments. "The worst part is intermission," she says, laughing. "It’s not over." Even praise won’t calm her jittery nerves.
"People tell you it’s going well, but what if they don’t like the second act?" She giggles, and then quickly turns serious. "I find that excruciating."
Ridiculous Fraud will be presented on the Berlind Stage of McCarter Theatre, 91 University Place, Princeton, May 5-June 11. Performances: Tues.-Thurs. 7:30 p.m.; Fri. 8 p.m.; Sat. 3, 8 p.m.; Sun. 2, 7:30 p.m. (no performance May 16, 23, no 7:30 p.m. performance May 14, 28, June 11). Tickets cost $28-$48. For information, call (609) 258-2787. On the Web: www.mccarter.org

