Post-Traumatic Stress, Some Themes & Variations

We don’t commonly think of the home environment as causing post-traumatic stress disorder. But Sam Shepard’s latest play, Heartless, running at the Signature theatre explores this theme.

Set in the Murphy home Heartless distinguishes itself from Shepard’s other plays in the predominance of women. Each of the five characters suffers trauma and subsequent symptoms of PTSD. Mother Mabel is wheelchair bound, having jumped or fallen from a pine tree after being abandoned by her husband. Her older daughter, Lucy, is tied to her disabled mother. Her younger daughter, thirty year old Sally, suffers survival guilt for receiving the heart of a murdered ten–year-old girl twenty years earlier. Roscoe, a sixty-five year-old ex-marine and child of the ‘60’s drug culture, has split from his wife of many years is making a video with Sally. A beautiful mute nurse tending to mother Mabel relives the murder of the heart donor, which she plays out through horrid grimaces and blood curdling screams.

(I think that the nurse is the incarnation of the dead girl, but this detail is open to interpretation).

Pulitizer Prize-winning Shepard has approached the topic  of PTSD in several of his plays, including Buried Child, and has acted in movies featuring PTSD (the 2009 movie, The Brothers, that deals with the aftermath of war and the family). Shepard’s own father, a WWII bomber pilot and an alcoholic, suffered from symptoms of PTSD and the playwright has modeled characters after his father in his other plays, including Curse of the Starving Class (1976).  His work has increased my awareness about the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder. Heart transplants and military service have something in common. The heart is drastically altered when confronted with death. This anxiety disorder develops in some people after seeing or living through an event that caused or threatened serious harm or death. It is characterized by:

Unwanted memories

Bad dreams

Emotional numbness

Intense guilt or worry

Angry outbursts

Feeling “on Edge”

Avoiding thoughts and

situations that bring up the trauma.

Before 1980, people with PTSD were labeled as “weak” and sometimes discharged from military service. PTSD, was officially recognized as a disorder in 1980.  The Diagnostic Statistical Manual describes the sufferer as manifesting:

 “…deliberate efforts to avoid certain thoughts, feelings, or conversations about the traumatic event and to avoid activities, situations, or people who arouse recollections of it.”

Contrary to the common tendency of the victim to deny the source of pain, the trauma must be confronted. Anti-depressant medication, especially the serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) have been found helpful in conjunction with talk therapy.

Conclusion: “Homelessness is the primary existential condition in Mr. Shepard’s universe, even when you’re at home,” Ben Brantley writes  (“All the Discomforts of Home,” New York Times, August 28, 2012). In the final analysis I think it’s fair to say that home is an internal psychological state. Home lies in the heart. In Shepard’s Heartless, no one is at home; everyone is rootless. Shepard continues to search and question and I think, asks us to do the same. The theme is especially relevant now, the eleventh anniversary of 9/11.

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