“A Piece of My Heart: – When nurses served in Vietnam…

Battle Zone

“A Piece of My Heart” on stage in Manhattan Beach

by Bondo Wyszpolski

The Manhattan Beach Community Church Theater should be commended for presenting a work that doesn’t merely entertain but rather induces us to reflect upon a rather painful and contentious period in our nation’s history. Based on the 1986 book of the same name by Keith Walker, which contains interviews with 26 women who served in Vietnam, Shirley Lauro’s “A Piece of My Heart” opened last weekend and depicts the dangers and horrors of war through the eyes of six women.

Four of the women were nurses, one was a Red Cross volunteer, and the sixth was a country-western singer from Texas whose band was promised a paycheck for flying to Saigon and entertaining the troops stationed there. The singer, MaryJo, is performed by Isabella Francesco. The nurses are played by Elora Becker as Sissy, Renee Turner as Martha, Cathy Ma as Leanne, B Alexander as Steele, and Lisa Golden as Whitney.

After a solemn gathering at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., each woman introduces herself and speaks about her background and why she enlisted or volunteered to go overseas. I’m not sure how much of this we’re supposed to retain because, by and large, “A Piece of My Heart” is an ensemble play where the characters are more like a Greek chorus or rather like backup singers without a lead vocalist..

Once their military plane lands, and without being fully prepared for what they will encounter, the women hit the ground running: They are immediately confronted with the severely wounded and dying in the hospitals they are sent to. There is one male actor, Jacob Helfgott, who steps up every time an injured soldier is required, but on the other hand he stands in for the momentary love interest since some of the women do have flings or sexual liaisons.

“A Piece of My Heart” is divided into two acts, the first focusing on being in Vietnam and the second on what awaits them upon returning to the States, but the scenes slide into one another without a break in the action. Also, the actors often assume secondary roles, briefly representing someone else, a commanding officer, for example (or, in Ma’s case, a Vietnamese woman), so that whatever we remember from their self-introduction becomes blurred.

For all that, there’s not a great deal of character interaction. Quite often the women will individually approach the lip of the stage and address us, the audience, as they describe one atrocity or grim experience after another. There’s one actress in the show whose wide-eyed look of horror is fairly nonstop, the lack of nuance perhaps better suited to a slasher film.

As one might expect, there’s a smattering of music from the 1960s. Occasionally MaryJo steps in with her guitar and sings a few lines from such songs as “Mrs. Robinson,” “White Rabbit,” and “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’”. The title of the play, “Piece Of My Heart” as made famous by Big Brother and the Holding Company, and sung by Janis Joplin (although originally recorded by the late Erma Franklin) seems to have come from lines delivered by Martha, who says of the injured soldiers, “A piece of my heart goes with each of them.”

When not fearing for their lives or sanity, the women resort to drinking and partying, because getting high was one sure way to temper the perpetual stress. In the morning the tension and the anxieties return. What is seen in the hospital wards cannot be unseen.

Even so, when it’s not verging on becoming a litany of horrors and thus something of a forced history lesson, the play has a confessional aspect and a need for intimacy. And so, two things here: Because the characters remain onstage throughout the duration of the show, it can seem a little cramped up there. Secondly, the cordless mics are not really their friends in that some of the inflections in the actors’ voices don’t come across. The viewer may feel at a remove as well.

Perhaps, instead of adhering strictly to the limitations of the stage, the fourth wall could have been breached. For example, I can envision the actors stepping down into the audience, maybe taking a seat next to us and then quietly intoning their lines, sharing their feelings.

I’m sure that Adrienne Fairley, the director, considered all of the possibilities when it came to positioning the actors in order to achieve maximum effects, but let’s move on to the second act, when our six characters board the plane to return home and kiss the ground (or the tarmac) in thanks when they arrive.

It’s commonly acknowledged that those returning from Vietnam were not exactly welcomed as heroes. They were often despised, as if they’d chosen to go overseas just to kill and maim and wreak havoc.

It is not what Sissy, Martha, Whitney, Leanne, MaryJo, and Steele have expected. Along with their disillusion they have brought back their traumas, their searing memories and nightmares. Many of them, we are told, could not sustain or form personal relationships; and some, in the case of Sissy, appear to suffer from the effects of their exposure to Agent Orange and other herbicides used to defoliate enemy ground cover. There were also the humiliations, as when MaryJo implies that she was sexually coerced but tries to brush it off. Back home, the agent that had sent her and her all-girl band to Vietnam reneges on his offer to pay them their $1,000 a month salary.

To be sure, the playwright has poured it on a little thick, and the actors cannot really overcome what I think is a not very solid play. At times, the characters are merely speaking at the audience rather than to the audience (like being on a soapbox for the author). There was some kind of rhythmic grace that often went missing in the show that I saw. B Alexander as Steele has a few passages where her intonation and pacing is spot on, and I wish I saw more of that from some of the others. But I again want to point out that the way the play is structured may be tricky and that to convincingly pull this off and engage the audience may require acting chops of a different caliber.

Towards the end of “A Piece of My Heart” the story line jumps ahead a couple of decades, and the six women, now back at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, tell us what they’ve become and what hurdles they’ve had to work around in order to arrive at where they are today. The set features visual renditions of the Wall, and we see the women looking for names they might recognize, meeting others who served, or leaving mementos behind the way one does at the scene of a traffic accident that took a good friend.

With the exception of occasionally throwing a coat over one shoulder or some other slight apparel, the characters are dressed in the same clothes throughout the play, army fatigues except a dress for Whitney and an even shorter one for MaryJo. Perhaps there is no room or time or budget for additional costumes, but ideally they’d be wearing colorful, perhaps girlish or frilly outfits at the start and later, after putting aside what they wore in Vietnam, more somber, austere clothing at the end.

And, speaking of the end, the honor guard returns — yes, several former vets, shouldering rifles, emerging from the wings and remembering the fallen with a 21-gun salute.

We look at the characters looking at the Wall with its 58,000 names, and what are we thinking in this supposedly patriotic moment? It is patriotic because the play leans us in that direction. But how ironic it all is, when once again there are protests against war on college campuses and our military is complicit in the ongoing death of thousands. What if that Wall suddenly turned red and honored those we killed? What if it was inscribed with the names of Palestinian and Israeli women and children? Is there ever an end to this madness?

In the meantime we have a play presented by a local group of theater enthusiasts that have been bringing us a wide range of comedy and drama for over 60 years. The current production isn’t among their best, but it makes us think and reflect, and that’s one of the communal gifts they’ve offered us for so long and for which we should be grateful.

A Piece of My Heart is being performed this Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and on Sunday at 2p.m., in the Manhattan Beach Community Church, 303 S. Peck Ave., Manhattan Beach. There is also a Veterans Day Celebration Performance scheduled for 2 p.m. on Nov. 10. Tickets, $25. Further details: mbcctheater.com. ER