One of the challenges for me in directing Crimes of the Heart was finding a way into the heart of southern American culture, marked by a vituperative humor thinly veiled by politeness, a strict adherence to a code of manners and social graces, and a resilience in the face of adversity. I sometimes think that northerners need a passport when visiting the American south.� Several years ago, I had the fortune to spend six months working in the south and became entranced by a culture I had only glimpsed through the writings of Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor especially O’Connor, whose gothic short stories filled with dark humor and surprising plot twists find a theatrical equivalent in Crimes of the Heart. And yet, for all its Southernism, I find the play’s portrayals of longing and desire, and of conflicted familial relationships where love and jealousy go hand in hand, to be so moving and true to my own experience, that the play easily crosses cultural lines in the U.S., and hopefully the Atlantic.

Jonathan Fox