Crane, Mississippi

Southern Gothic, a dramatic staple, gets an over-the-top workout in the world premiere of Crane, Mississippi Timothy McNeil gives us a redneck family so crude, mean and grotesque as to make Jeeter Lester and his brood look like Boston Brahmins. McNeil and director Kristin Hanggi also have them raging at each other from start to finish, a same-note mistake which turns what might have been a gripping drama into an excrutiating experience for the audience. It's a pity restraint wasn't exercised, because McNeil is an able dramatist, capable of putting people in heightened conflict with each other. He can also write with delicacy and humor, only to spoil things by turning his characters into caricatures. His theme is how the chains of the past imprison three siblings: Sister (Melanie Jones), Heloise (May Quigley Goodman) and Junior (Jon Lee Cope), each of whom contains a multitude of moral and psychological problems.

The children of alcoholic, abusive parents (are there any other kind in American literature these days?), they carry on the family tradition by moping around the house in slatternly fashion, boozing and bickering endlessly. Heloise is the power broker by virtue of the money she has inherited; a loud, venomous creature with the humanity of a concentration-camp guard. Junior is almost as bad, a fat hulking thing whose pedophilia got him disbarred as a lawyer.

Sister is the protagonist, a one-time highschool beauty queen whose one chance to break away from this foul nest ended in disaster when the only boy she ever loved failed to fight for her hand. A browbeaten, hopeless alcoholic, she gets a second chance in life when, after a 20-year absence, her old boyfriend Walter (playwright McNeil) turns up for a highschool reunion and begs her to leave town with him. Heloise and Junior aren't about to let her go, not without an all-out battle. It's two against one, though Sister does get some help from her friend Katy (E.P. McKnight), the daughter of the family's former maid. Katy is just about the only sympathetic character in the story (even Walter is depicted as a weak-willed shlub) -- and therein lies the major problem with Crane: having to spend two hours with loathsome characters who are always screaming at each other. It's a hard thing to take, despite all the admirable work done by the actors and creative team.