'A Piece of My Heart' opens Tuesday at Rose Theatre

When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, none of the six women playing nurses in the University Theatre's upcoming production of "A Piece of My Heart" had been born. They learned about the war in American history books that tell a different story from those in Shirley Lauro's play, which is based on the emotionally courageous oral histories of 26 women who also served.

Jackson High School student Lydia Blades is playing Sissy, a sweet 20-year-old nurse from Erie, Penn., who can't stand seeing people in pain and joined the Army early in the war hoping to save the world. She and the other nurses immediately are immersed in a world filled with mutilated men they can do little to mend, and psychological and physical violence directed at them from all sides.

Blades has only been in comedies in high school and says, "I haven't gone through anything that has hurt me." Rehearsals for "A Piece of My Heart" have touched new emotions.

"Some of us started crying one night," she recalled. "It hurt us to be saying these things we know these women went through."

The play opens Tuesday night at Rose Theatre.

"A Piece of My Heart" will be Southeast's entry into the American College Theatre Festival. Judges from the festival will score the performances and behind-the-scenes work. Instead of employing faculty members as usual, director Dr. Sharon Bebout-Carr has students designing the set, costumes, sound and lighting.

Costume designer Sarah Moore roamed the Internet looking for Vietnam-era clothing styles worn on the homefront and military uniforms. She put Maryjo, the USO entertainer who "becomes a sexual commodity," in hot pants.

Marcus Stephens' abstract set has both female and phallic dimensions befitting the sexual power struggle the nurses encounter. Stephens' set is meant to convey another dynamic occurring on-stage. "It acts like a whirlpool," he says. "There are many different emotions happening at the same time. That's what Vietnam is to me."

Sue Johnson is designing the lighting, and Kareem Boctor is in charge of the sound, both important elements in this play.

Over the course of "A Piece of My Heart," the six women age 20 years, evolving from young women naively arriving in Vietnam to middle-aged women coping with the effect the war is still having on their lives.

Tonya Lynn, who plays a tough Army brat named Martha, learned about the Vietnam War exclusively at school. "This is from a personal perspective," she says of the play, "and it leads me to feel very differently about the war.

"... It's very easy to look at war in broad strokes," she says. "But every number is a person, and every person has a family."

Holly Raines plays the blue-blooded Whitney. Raines' father served in Vietnam but has talked little about his experiences there, she says.

Janel Mason will play Maryjo, a blonde USO entertainer. Natasha Toro is Leann, an urbane Asian American. Donna Harmon plays Steele, an older black woman. Steve Ruppel plays all the male roles.

Petty Officer Matthew Enos, a Navy Seal temporarily assigned to the Cape Girardeau recruiting office, was brought in to help the students with military realism. "They had to march," said Bebout-Carr, "and it was pitiful."

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial makes an appearance in the play in an abstract way. Moore has been to The Wall. Her family found the names of some of her mother's cousins who died in the war. They made rubbings. Without living through the war, the wall made real for her the loss.

"I cried. I bawled," she said. "... It goes on and on. You think you will get to the end, and it just goes on and on."

The actresses say they are emotionally spent at the end of each rehearsal. All of them are on-stage during the whole play.

A number of the plays Bebout-Carr has directed at Southeast have had emotional underpinnings. Some she wrote were based on personal experiences. But, she says, "I don't ever remember coming out of rehearsals for a production this exhausted."

The patriotic fervor following Sept. 11 gave Bebout-Carr no qualms about directing a play that wrenchingly portrays what happens to people in war and because of war. Right now, her son is somewhere in the world serving aboard a nuclear submarine.

"It isn't anti-war," she says of the play. "It's more about jogging our collective memories about things that are connected."

sblackwell@semissourian.com

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