Young Heavenly Critchfield is the girl all the boys want, especially the rich and refined Arthur Shannon, but she’s in love (or lust) with the rough Dick Miles. The epitome of the tragic southern belle, Heavenly struggles to reconcile her sensual yearnings with her societal duty. The play, which takes place in the small town of Port Tyler, Mississippi in the Spring of 1937, is a classic deep South tale of adolescent rites of passage which prefigures the tragic female characters and lyric romanticism of Williams’ later works, such as The Glass Menagerie.
