When doctoral student Christina Allaback decided to propose a play to direct for the University Theatre’s Second Season, which began last night, she knew she wanted to cover the horrifying effects of war without turning off any potential pro-war audience members. It was a difficult task to find such a play, but she found exactly what she was looking for in “A Piece of My Heart,” a haunting tale of six women during the throes of the Vietnam War.
“For some reason, high school teachers or American society at large doesn’t want to acknowledge this huge failure (of the Vietnam War), so that got me thinking,” Allaback said. “When it came time to propose a play, I thought I’d really like to do something exploring war because we are at war. We should be doing art that expresses what we feel about war, how war affects us – not only as individuals, but as a society as well.”
“A Piece of My Heart,” written by award-winning playwright Shirley Lauro, explores the true-life tales of six women – from nurses to an entertainer to an intelligence officer – who struggle with the effects of war abroad as well as at home. They each must deal with their own personal demons, as well as those created by the war. But what makes this play so different from other Vietnam War artistic expressions is that it is solely about the women’s roles and experiences in the war – something that had been overlooked for
many years.
“(Women) were ignored,” Michelle Rodrigue, who plays “Martha,” said. “I like that you get a different side of a singer, a military brat, an officer, a black woman, an Asian woman – just a huge variety of women. But I like how they represent that we’re all kind of one woman and that no matter who we were, we were all ignored and treated like crap when we came back (from Vietnam).”
Anna Metzger-Seig, who plays singer “Mary Jo,” has high hopes that the audience will take something meaningful out of
their performance.
“I hope that (the audience) opens their minds a little bit more,” Metzger-Seig said. “What’s so interesting about this show is that you actually get to delve into these women’s lives, really delve into them, and see what happens before and after the war.”
Jay Hash, the sole male in the play, sees this piece as a more balanced story than most of the tales that have come out of the Vietnam era.
“The interesting thing about this play is that it’s more true-to-life than what you normally see about Vietnam,” said Hash. “I mean, you take things like ‘Platoon,’ ‘Apocalypse Now’ or anything else that’s traditionally considered a Vietnam War story, and you see all of the craziness and all of the drugged-out people – all the people who had just exited civilization entirely. And then you take the flip side, stories like ‘We Were Soldiers,’ which is kind of the more militaristic – ‘We were doing a good thing and these were good guys that died.’ But (‘A Piece of My Heart’) is more somewhere in the middle. You see the craziness that’s starting to erupt after they finally see what’s going on, and also the naÃ