The Jacksonian: A Play - Softcover

Henley, Beth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810130653 ISBN 13: 9780810130654

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2014

Synopsis

In The Jacksonian, Beth Henley returns to the Southern Gothic storytelling that made her reputation with both critics and audiences. Set in a seedy motel in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1964, the play centers around Rosy, a troubled teenager, and Bill, her dentist father who has been living at the motel for several months as his wife, Susan, considers the disgrace of divorce. Fred, the motel bartender, and Eva, a waitress, are locked in a gruesome pact: he’ll marry her if she agrees to help him evade punishment for a hideous crime. But Bill, turning to nitrous oxide to ease the pain of his life collapsing around him, is a convenient target for Eva’s desperate desire for companionship. At the height of the violence associated with the civil rights movement, these characters gradually reveal the shameful secrets and psychological turmoil just beneath the surface of their insistent Southern gentility.

About this title

About the Author:

Beth Henley won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best American Play forCrimes of the Heart (1978) and was nominated for an Academy Award for her screenplay based on the play. Her most recent plays includeSisters of the Winter Madrigal (2003) and Ridiculous Fraud (2007). Her screenwriting credits also includeNobody’s Fool, True Stories (written with David Byrne), and Miss Firecracker,based on her play The Miss Firecracker Contest (1979).

Review:

“You see, Ms. Henley isn’t flirting with the clichés of Southern Gothic and pulp fiction. She’s embracing them with such ardor that she squeezes new life out of them. The result is her most entertaining work since she won the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award for Crimes of the Heart three decades ago.”
— Ben Brantley, New York Times



 


“This 90-minute, part David Lynch, part Flannery O’Connor slice of Southern Gothic is a reminder of the simultaneously dark and often hilarious mix of confusion, rage, and just plain eccentricity that marked Henley in her Pulitizer Prize–winning Crimes of the Heart.”



—Christian Science Monitor

About this edition

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0810130653
• ISBN 13: 9780810130654
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 88