Beth Henley

A southern family faces a crisis when one of the sisters shoots her husband. This happens before the play begins; the bulk of the play is less about the shooting than about the relationships between the three girls, with a couple of other factors thrown in for complexity. Difficult to find too many people in this group to like, or to feel sympathy with, but there is still the ability to engage as you watch people losing all touch with reality and moving toward destruction. The ending is show more ambiguous and unresolved; that is not a complaint, as I often find that compelling in a dramatic work. It's hard to see this as a masterpiece, but it is definitely past competent, with the various threads skillfully woven, though a few stitches are dropped in the weaving. show less

Those who know Beth Henley from her play (and the subsequent movie) Crimes of the Heart will get something darker with her play Abundance, set in the Old West. I listened to the dramatized version by LA Theatre Works, starring JoBeth William as Macon Hill Curtis and Amy Madigan as Bess Johnson Flann.

Two mail-order brides head to Wyoming in the 1860s, and both discover that their new lives aren’t what they were expected. You won’t get any of romanticization as in Sarah, Plain and Tall, show more but you’ll enjoy a tale — marked with equal parts humor, pathos, and grit — of two women trying to make the best of their situations and their relationship over the ensuing 25 years. show less

LATW version. Strong performance of a bleak play. Two mail order women show up on the frontier to become wives to two very different men, scraping together a meagre existence and dreaming of better days. The relationships and triangle drama feel fairly predictable until the midway turn when the naively optimistic of the two women goes missing. What follows lacks the action of [b:True Grit|257845|True Grit|Charles show more Portis|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1436277655l/257845._SY75_.jpg|1320617] but feels similar to its ending, as fate takes the characters down new, unexpected roads, but ends ambiguously with a melancholic note of nobody ever really being in control over the twists of a life that runs by all too fast. show less

LATW version. Strong performance of a bleak play. Two mail order women show up on the frontier to become wives to two very different men, scraping together a meagre existence and dreaming of better days. The relationships and triangle drama feel fairly predictable until the midway turn when the naively optimistic of the two women goes missing. What follows lacks the action of True Grit but feels similar to its ending, as fate takes the characters down new, unexpected roads, but ends show more ambiguously with a melancholic note of nobody ever really being in control over the twists of a life that runs by all too fast.

Merged review:

LATW version. Strong performance of a bleak play. Two mail order women show up on the frontier to become wives to two very different men, scraping together a meagre existence and dreaming of better days. The relationships and triangle drama feel fairly predictable until the midway turn when the naively optimistic of the two women goes missing. What follows lacks the action of True Grit but feels similar to its ending, as fate takes the characters down new, unexpected roads, but ends ambiguously with a melancholic note of nobody ever really being in control over the twists of a life that runs by all too fast. show less