A Study Guide for Beth Henley's "Impossible Marriage"
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A Study Guide for Beth Henley's "Impossible Marriage" - Gale
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Impossible Marriage
Beth Henley
1998
Introduction
American playwright Beth Henley's play Impossible Marriage was first produced on stage by the Roundabout Theater Company in New York City in October 1998. It was published in the same year in a hardcover edition by Stage & Screen, and appeared the following year in a paperback edition from Dramatists Play Service. Impossible Marriage was also included in the collection Beth Henley: Collected Plays Volume II: 1990-1999, published by Smith & Kraus in 2000.
Impossible Marriage is one of many Southern-flavored plays by Henley that reflect her Mississippi upbringing. The play deals with an impending, ill-fated wedding set at a country estate in Savannah, Georgia. It is a melodramatic black comedy of manners, full of over-blown gestures and witty observations, and is reminiscent of the plays of the nineteenth-century Irish author Oscar Wilde. In its simultaneous comedy and seriousness, Impossible Marriage also has a flavor of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, whom Henley has cited as an influence on her work. The main theme of the play is the conflict between civilization and passion. While critics consider it to be of secondary importance to Henley's best-known play, Crimes of the Heart (first produced in 1979), Impossible Marriage has proved a popular success.
Author Biography
Beth Henley was born Elizabeth Becker Henley on May 8, 1952, in Jackson, Mississippi, the second of four daughters of Charles Boyce, an attorney and Mississippi state senator, and Elizabeth Josephine Henley, an actress. Inspired by watching her mother rehearse for plays, the young Henley intended to become an actress. With this goal in mind, she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, in 1974.
While at college, Henley joined an acting group and wrote her first play, Am I Blue, which was produced at the university's Margo Jones Theatre in 1973 and published by Dramatists Play Service in 1982. From 1974 to 1975 Henley taught drama at the Dallas Minority Repertory Theatre. In 1975, she began graduate study in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Illinois, Urbana. However, she never completed the program. Instead, in 1976, she moved to Los Angeles to live with actor and director Stephen Tobolowsky, with whom she would later collaborate on the screenplay for True Stories (released by Warner Bros. in 1986). Unsuccessful in finding acting roles, she threw herself into playwriting.
In 1978, Henley submitted a three-act play, Crimes of the Heart, to the Great American Play Contest sponsored by the Actors Theatre of Louisville, Kentucky. Based on Chekhov's play The Three Sisters, Crimes of the Heart is a black comedy about three sisters living in a small Southern town. It won the contest