The Heart
The Heart — Book and some lyrics by Kait Kerrigan, music and most of the lyrics by Anne Eisendrath and Ian Eisendrath, based on Maylis de Kerangal’s Réparer les Vivants, which translates to “Mend the Living,” which tells you pretty much where the story’s heart lies (pun of sorts very much intended, as the show itself makes a point of bringing in all manner of heart-related idioms, e.g. “My heart is free,” “You are my heart,” “Put your heart into it,” etc.) — is a musical procedural. That is, it’s about a procedure. (And given the placards outside the theater stressing the virtues of organ donation, I don’t think it’s any kind of spoiler to note that the procedure is a heart transplant.)
You feel it right from the outset, when we shift from doomed young surfer Simon belting out how the waves are “where I’m meant to be” and “my destiny” to an emergency room staff doing a patter song about how “It’s the rush, it’s the devotion/ It’s the high from the commotion” to a donation counselor singing about brain-dead Simon’s bereaved parents: “Time is ticking/ Where will they land?/ Stuck but sinking/ Caught in the quicksand.” Everybody’s got their own drama; the procedure hovers over all. We do get a song from Simon’s Mom and Dad — but also his DJ girlfriend, the nurse watching over his vitals, a donor/recipient matchmaker, a surgeon, and oh yes, the eventual recipient. You see it right from the outset as well, in the choice to have Simon sit just offstage instead of having him lie on his hospital bed. Everyone who interacts with his body and its still-beating heart interacts with empty air. Because even when they sing to him as if he were there — Mom: “I won’t ever let you go;” Nurse: “I’ll be right here with you when you leave” — the audience must be reminded that the person is gone. What remains is the procedure.
Because of this, the parents’ hesitation to designate their son a donor — he hadn’t named himself as one, so the counselor says “we must imagine for ourselves” what he would have wanted — cannot be seen as anything but an obstacle to be overcome. Mom hopes her son will wake up from his coma, but this isn’t one of those gray-area cases that get the ethicists all upset: she is assured that “his life is over.” She then recalls her grandmother: “All those Catholic Masses she took me to — the Latin, the incense, the sanctity of the body!” Dad is just horrified: “You’re not scrapping my son for parts!” But our counselor likes a challenge, and asks them, “Was he religious? Was he generous?” The latter question gets an imperfect answer; the key recollection shows that he was fair-minded, not generous. As for the former, well, there’s an 11 o’clock dream sequence involving incense, Latin, and Catholic veneration of the body that serves to show us where true religion lies: “But what if we could help somebody?” Who could argue? They cut up saints, don’t they?
There are other dramas as well, my favorite of which involves the potential recipient, who greets us with the rowdy, raucous, and rousing “Nobody Gets Out Alive.” She’s had years to get ready to go; now she’s got hours to reckon with the prospect of sticking around. Middle-aged existential angst is a tricky business — anyone can die, it’s living that’s hard, etc. — and the show handles it with good-natured, tough-minded care. (The script’s biggest and best laugh comes during her attempt to write a letter to Simon.)
What else? The music tends to go big and high energy, and the big-time cast has the stuffing for it. A death may be near the heart of the show, but the procedure aims to give life, not end it, and so the overall feel is upbeat instead of morbid or maudlin. And video designer Lucy Mackinnon makes the absolute most of her medical milieu.