THEATER

The wonderful visual touches to New Village Arts Theatre's Crimes of the Heart tend to take on lives of their own. Sometimes, that's this show's curse, and it happens because playwright Beth Henley has written way more than she needs in order to create those effects. But that's black comedy-by definition, it's unceasingly morbid and gloomy and calamitous and silly and weird and fun and over-the-top. And anyway, you can't argue with success. This play did win a Pulitzer in 1981, and it's the first to have done so before reaching Broadway. If the judges were willing to stick their necks out like that, who are we to complain?

Fact is, those wonderful visual touches frame Kristianne Kurner's monumental turn as tinderbox Lenny Magrath, still living at home on her 30th birthday and well on her way to spinsterhood by virtue of a “shrunken ovary.” Henley's excesses feed this character from there-but in Kurner's hands, the writer's liberties are also Lenny's ways of coping with her miseries, and that's what gives them their legitimacy. Kurner is absolutely incredible in this role, and her performance unshakably anchors this excellent New Village season opener.

Lenny's shrunken ovary is the least of her worries. She's hopelessly stuck in the small-town asylum that is the Hazelhurst, Miss., of the early 1980s; her mom's just iced herself and has taken the cat with her; her granddad's in the hospital with the aftereffects of a stroke; Billy Boy, her favorite horse, was struck and killed by lightning; her youngest sister Babe (Amanda Sitton) is out on bail after shooting her abusive husband in the stomach (she didn't like his looks); and her middle sister Meg (Jessica John) drinks like a champ and squandered a chance at a singing career after the booze landed her in a loonybin. If that isn't enough, the sisters' socialite cousin Chick (Wendy Waddell) is freaking because her kids just ate some paint.

On and on it goes, as director Dana Case indulges Henley's bottomless bag of ideas. Lenny's all-arms-and-legs befuddlement as she celebrates her 30th by herself; Meg's drunken, stocking-footed account of her evening with paramour Doc Porter (Francis Gercke); Babe putting curlers in her hair at the kitchen table for no particular reason while she talks about a stingy friend and a poster of handicapped kids: This show is full of preposterous stuff like that, setting the tone for an equally unlikely exploration of the sisters' rivalries and, ultimately, their unbreakable bonds.

Things eventually get serious enough to expose the show's flaws-Gercke's Porter is a little too aw-shucks for comfort, and Daren Scott is a tad too old for the part of Barnett Lloyd, Babe's nerd lawyer. But Kurner totally has matters in hand from start to stop. Her work is an object lesson in due diligence-she's not missed a syllable of opportunity to exploit Lenny's foibles and untapped strength. She and her cast mates bask in a show that works precisely because it shouldn't.

This show runs in repertory with Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters, which opens Saturday, Feb. 17. After that, New Village's season will continue at its new venue on Carlsbad's State Street.

This review is based on the opening-night performance of Feb. 10. Crimes of the Heart runs through March 18 at the Jazzercise studio space, 2460 Impala Drive in Carlsbad. $20-$22. 760-433-3245.

Yeah-but where's Eric?

The San Diego Repertory Theatre's Brooklyn Boy is a mixed bag, which is a way of saying it's hard to know what to make of it. Author Donald Margulies has written three sketches here-one that features a look at Brooklyn's day-to-day Jewish community, another on the Judaism that drives it and a third about neither. So far, so good, except there's little or nothing to anchor each piece.

Eric Weiss (James Newcomb) has written “Brooklyn Boy,” a best-selling novel about the effect of a place (Brooklyn, oddly enough) on a people (its Jews). His longtime friend Ira Zimmer (a very good Matthew Henerson) is the link between Weiss' roots and the fame that's rapidly ruining his life. Weiss will embrace his faith anew-and while that very key scene is very lovely, it almost comes out of nowhere, because there's not enough on Weiss' Judaism (or Brooklyn-ness, for that matter) during most of the play, such as in the scenes in which he leaves his estranged wife for good and takes a bimbo to his hotel room while on a book tour.

The Todd Salovey-directed show isn't bad, especially actorially-it just doesn't always have a very meaningful handle on itself.

Brooklyn Boy runs through March 4 at the Lyceum space, 79 Horton Plaza, Downtown. $28-$31. 619-544-1000. Write to marty@SDcitybeat.com.