East Tennessean

Issue date: 11/12/09 Section: News

Media Credit: ETSU File Photo Noah Wall performs in A Piece of My Heart, an award-winning play by Shirley Lauro that will be playing in the Bud Frank Theatre this week.

This Veterans Day through the following weekend, ETSU's Division of Theatre and Dance is presenting a memorial that brims with the joys, laughter, songs, sighs and sorrows of life and war in the form of playwright and author Shirley Lauro's award-winning A Piece of My Heart.

The show opened Tuesday with a Veterans Day military salute presented by the ETSU Military Science Department and its ROTC program. Pre-show musical performances by The Sugar Candies will begin at 7 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday, Nov. 11-14, and 1:30 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 15, in the Bud Frank Theatre, located in Gilbreath Hall.

This living memorial for stage, which debuted in New York in 1991, not only commemorates veterans of the Vietnam War, but also focuses especially on its quietest heroes - the women who served there. Based on firsthand accounts of nurses, Red Cross workers and entertainers who volunteered to enter those distant jungles in the 1960s, the show has been praised by critics as "heart-wrenching," "cathartic" and "a work with the music and soul of a tumultuous era."

ETSU's cast and crew are treating this theatrical memorial with much reverence and respect. "I am really proud to be able to tell a story that not many people know," says sophomore theatre major Shannon Brown, who portrays the hard-core character Steele, as well as several others. "I hope a lot of veterans come to see the show, and they realize that we are doing this for them."

Educating a younger generation is part of their mission, too. "It's especially meaningful for me," says senior Hannah Love, whose main character is adventure-seeking Sissy, "because no one knows a whole lot about Vietnam, especially our generation, especially about the nurses. I didn't even know there were females over there working as nurses."

As part of a different generation, director Bobby Funk knew there were women in Vietnam, and actually was attracted to this script because "the women's experience in Vietnam really intrigued me," he says.

The drama and emotion were also compelling and powerful, the ETSU actors say. "In theater, great plays are filled with struggle, and in plays about war, you often come across characters making life and death decisions," says actor and professor Funk, whose own parents were World War II veterans who met in France.

Continued...

Page 1 of 3 next >

Article Tools