'Heart!!!' aptly named

"Heart!!!" earns its exclamation points. Ambitious and deliciously messy, this senior thesis production written and directed by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins '06 spends two hours examining that pulsating, fist-sized muscle in your chest and comes to some interesting conclusions.

The play is about an African American boy with a heart problem and his life with his family of amputees. Randall (Rodney DeaVault '07) is a student at an Ivy League university, presumably Princeton, who returns home for spring break to find his family, literally and figuratively, broken.

Randall's mother, Bernice (Zelda Harris '07), has only five of ten fingers left, since her two jobs as a paper filer and garbage collector had caused the paper cuts from one job to become infected with the bacteria from the other. Randall's father, Ward (Justin Beazer), lost a leg at work, but because his neurological ghost leg leaves him itching at empty airspace, he refuses to wear his prosthetic and opts instead for homemade crutches. And Randall's teenage sister, Katrina (Kiran Chitanvis '07), is dying of an incurable disease that has robbed her of her precious hair.

The story of "Heart!!!" grows out of its characters, again, quite literally. Some examples: Katrina's hair is personified onstage by a manic, spandex-clad sprite (Dan Kublick '07) who pays her a surprise visit before her birthday. Randall's heart becomes a character, making a loud, ghastly, car-crash-like noise whenever he takes his hand away from it. Periodically, a troupe of authors dressed as clowns with day-glo hair interjects into the action with marginally relevant renditions of Univision-style Spanish soap operas, late-night evangelists and snotty, pedantic nonfiction writers.

Clearly, a healthy sense of the absurd pervades both Jacobs-Jenkins' form and his narrative. This is serious stuff, to be sure, but a subtle surrealism infects it, not as a cheap throwaway trick but as a vehicle to convey theme, drawing from theater, literature and television and flowing easily from hallucination to dream to reality. And that's why the play works. Because if you think about it, themes related to the heart are perhaps as overdone as any that drama has ever tackled. Jacobs-Jenkins' play succeeds in understanding this basic assumption and riffing on it. Rather than fall into the comfortable cushion of clichéd heart metaphors, "Heart!!!" examines the various ways in which human civilization has created these arbitrary conceptions of the essential body part.

Emotional headquarters, life-giving organ, love's dwelling place—Jacobs-Jenkins' play examines the heart's function from every angle. Strains of Hank Williams' "Your Cheatin' Heart" and the Rolling Stones' "Stealing My Heart" waft into the theater before the show, exemplifying just how obsessed our culture is with investing deeper spiritual and emotional significance in the heart. Although "Heart!!!" is slyly sensitive to the audience's preconceptions, the play is never cold or cerebral. Its meta-awareness does not prevent it from telling a good story straight.

Unfortunately, a confusing and confused second half leaves the audience unsure if they came back from the intermission to the same play. Taking an undeserved turn toward the serious, "Heart!!!" loses some of the easy charm that defines its first half. Diving deep into the dark waters in which the first act is content to wade, "Heart!!!" becomes almost maudlin, explicitly addressing artificial themes that were only alluded to before, such as racism.

Randall and his relatives are African-American, and Bernice's suspicion of white people creates sparks in family discussions about Randall's "white" Ivy League education and white girlfriend (Alex Ripp '08). But because none of the characters harbor strong racist feelings, the racial tensions feel manufactured. Jacobs-Jenkins' treatment of racial topics feels heavy-handed in a play that has enough to tackle in examining matters of the heart alone.

Overall, the play is a solid piece of work, a heartfelt and carefully crafted piece which draws both big laughs and stunned silence. The statement that "Heart!!!" has heart comes to mind, but to say it in seriousness would be to succumb to the hackneyed metaphors that the play smartly studies and challenges. Indeed, what is perhaps most remarkable about "Heart!!!" is that it earns not only its exclamation marks, but also a few well-placed question marks.