Full disclosure: It’s hard for me to be completely neutral about A Piece of My Heart. It’s a story about nurses and other women who served in Vietnam during that war. That was my generation of nurses. Several of my original classmates enlisted. I don’t know their stories. The stories I did hear – I was off raising children – were from GIs who returned home and much later shared their stories of both the war and the aftermath.
The aftermath is very much a part of A Piece of My Heart. In fact, it’s the entire second half. Women weren’t as apt to be spat on as men, I suspect – and what idiot in some national media outlet said they suspected it was an urban legend, since there were no documented cases? [There were. Many.] – but there were far more consequences afterwards than that. Far more.
All these women we encounter before they begin the adventure that will take them to Southeast Asia. Steele (Patience Davis) is career Army. MaryJo (Chelsie Johnston) is in an all-girl singing group that’s moved to LA to make it big. Whitney (Annalise Webb) comes from a wealthy family and an Ivy League college. Martha (Mara Bollini)’s an Army brat, and Leeann (Vicky Chen) and Sissy (Madison Jackson) meet in nursing school. There are, obviously, men around, too, Shane Signorino as a multitude of them.
If you missed the Vietnam War because you were too young, you may find the play too melodramatic. It’s condensed experience – but it doesn’t exaggerate. I cannot compare it to subsequent ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I knew nurses from World War II and Korea, and Vietnam was a totally different experience. Whitney goes to work for the Red Cross and becomes a donut dolly, as the slang goes, and MaryJo is with the USO. Steele does intelligence work. All different experiences, all some very heavy lifting.
Thomas Wolfe must have been cited a lot back then – maybe you arrive at the place where you were raised, where your family is, but you can’t completely go home again. You change, “home”, whatever that is, changes. Wrestling with that is not so dramatic, but it’s hard not to be taken back to what Agent Orange did to families, not just the vets, or how PTSD didn’t manifest itself immediately.
Playwright Shirley Lauro has given us a memorable collection of characters, and WEPG cast them well. Davis and Signorino give particularly good performances for director Dani Mann.
Unlike the Depression or World War II or COVID, the Vietnam War influenced American society slowly, stealthily. In this time when our attention is diverted in so many other ways, a reminder about war isn’t at all out of line. A Piece of My Heart is a good chance to learn or remember.
If this is your first time at this venue, there’s a good-sized parking lot behind, and the entrance is back there as well.
A Piece of My Heart
through December 19
West End Players Guild
Union Avenue Christian Church
733 Union Boulevard
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