Piece of My Heart

A Piece of My Heart follows six women who volunteered for Vietnam and the twenty years it took them to be counted as having been there. Five are nurses and army personnel. The sixth is a country singer on a tour who expected to entertain soldiers and ends up in the wards.

The first half is the tour itself: triage under fire, an operating theatre run by people barely out of training, the arithmetic of who gets treated first. The second half is what happens afterwards. The women come home to a country that has decided not to discuss the war, to families who cannot hear it, to medical systems with no category for them, and to a memorial wall that lists the dead but says nothing about who kept them alive.

Shirley Lauro wrote the play in the 1980s, adapting Keith Walker's book of interviews with women who served, and every character is drawn from documented accounts. It is written for six actors and one man who plays every male role in it, which is a structural choice rather than an economy: the men are interchangeable, and the women are not.

The staging is deliberately bare, with scenes moving between years and continents in a sentence, much of the text addressed straight to the audience, and period songs threaded through. The tone is plain and unsentimental, and the play trusts the material to do the work without underlining it.

It ends at the wall, with all six of them there at once for the first time, which is the only moment in the play where the audience sees them as the group history eventually made of them.