THEATRE + COMEDY

Company OnStage presents The Miss Firecracker Contest, by Beth Henley.  Running July 1 - 30, 2011 (5 weeks).

In a small town in Mississippi, Carnelle Scott is feverishly rehearsing for the town's annual Miss Firecracker Contest in the hope that a victory will salvage her tarnished reputation. To help her along the way are a newly arrived in town seamstress and two cousins, one a former Miss Firecracker and the other just released from a mental institution.

A southern Gothic comedy from Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, Beth Henley.

When Beth Henley is really flying, her comic voice has the crazed yet liberating sound of a Rebel yell. In ''The Miss Firecracker Contest,''  this Mississippi-bred playwright reaches that high pitch for the first time since her celebrated debut, ''Crimes of the Heart.'' Who but Miss Henley can describe one tragedy after another and send us home smiling?

This time, we hear about midgets, orphans and deformed kittens - and they're the fortunate ones. Other characters, whether on stage or off, are afflicted by cancer, tuberculosis, venereal disease and, most of all, heartbreak. Even so, the evening's torrential downpour of humor - alternately Southern-Gothic absurdist, melancholy and broad - almost never subsides.