If there’s a rose that grows in no man’s land, I’m afraid she’s not to be found at the Union Square Theater, where the Manhattan Theater Club is presenting “A Piece of My Heart,” Shirley Lauro’s dreadful docudrama about women in Vietnam and how they got shortchanged because nobody understood or appreciated their suffering. The play, in which four nurses, an Army officer, and a U.S.O. entertainer—Annette Helde, Cynthia Carle, Corliss Preston, Sharon Schlarth, Kim Miyori, and Novella Nelson—stand around talking to the audience, manages to be both inept and exploitative. One by one, the women identify themselves and the naïve dreams or idealistic impulses that took them to Southeast Asia, and we find how those dreams and impulses were betrayed by the horrors of war. Nothing in any of the stories is unfamiliar, nothing is unpredictable. The spectrum of characters echoes the pattern of Second World War movies: instead of the college boy, the bigot, the kid from Brooklyn, et al., we have a debutante, an Army brat, a girl who wants to get out of small-town America, a black, an Asian, and a country-and-Western singer. When minor characters are needed to flesh out a scene, the other actresses join in as extras, while a single actor—Tom Stechschulte—plays “all the American men.”
“A Piece of My Heart,” which was developed at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, has a lot of plodding staging from Allen R. Belknap, who directed, and a lot of bad regional acting (as opposed to good regional acting, which it hasn’t got any of), and a lot of music that is either live and inexplicable (“Mrs. Robinson”? “This Old Man”?), sung by Cynthia Carle accompanying herself on a guitar, or recorded and ferociously ironic (Sousa marches). Even the minimalist, multilevel set designed by James Fenhagen—all bare platforms and bits of bamboo and corrugated iron—is a cliché.
The fact that it’s so clear so early on what kind of play this is—the kind in which people tell you what you already know and then act it out for you—makes it a virtual torment to sit through. More than its amateurishness, though, what strikes one about “A Piece of My Heart” is the questionable impulse behind it. Lauro has taken—from Keith Walker’s oral history of the same title—stories of unimaginable suffering (they really do tear your heart apart) and has reduced them to dramatic formula. It’s something she has done before: her play “Open Admissions,” which was based on her experiences as a speech instructor at one of the municipal colleges, had some merit as a modest one-acter performed at Ensemble Studio Theater, but when she expanded it for Broadway it, too, became meaningless and formulaic; truth had been subjugated to an idea of “drama.” At least in that case it was her own story she was messing around with.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, November 18, 1991