"A Population [and Theater] at Risk": Battered Women in Heney's Crimes of the Heart and Shepard's A Lie of the Mind

Abstract

Oft-castigated for its preponderance of family drama, American theater seems unprotestingly to cede stature to British theater, which has moved from "kitchen-sink" realism to presumably more universal and political plays. Yet the charge of lIiviality levelled against American "diaper drama" in the theater dissipates in the face of the domestic drama currently being played on the cultural stage: statistics indicate that "An American resident is 'more likely to be physically assaulted, beaten, and killed in the home at the hands of a loved one than any place else, or by anyone else. " That many such residents are women led former U.S. Surgeon-General C. Everett Koop in 1989 to decry wife-battering as "an overwhelming moral, economic, and public health burden that our society can no longer bear" and to identify battered women as "a population at risk." Current Surgeon-General Antonia Novello. in 1992 backed a surprising American Medical Association declaration of domestic violence against women as an epidemic requiring intervention by health officials. Should they escape their kitchens for the theater, those four million women assaulted annually ·would hardly find American family plays lIivial or apolitical.