Heart and Mind

Just when you thought Vietnam had been banished from the American psyche by the glory in the Gulf, along comes A Piece of My Heart, Shirley Lauro's harrowing play (based on a book by Keith Walker) about six women stationed in Southeast Asia during the late sixties. Aside from its characters' sex, the drama covers familiar ground—the war's carnage, the government's betrayal—but at Louisville's Humana Festival of New American Plays last spring it seemed to strike a fresh chord of catharsis, bringing audiences to tears—and their feet—nightly. Nobody has been more moved than Lauro herself, who admits she never gave much thought to Vietnam until she bought Walker's book in an airport gift shop. "By the time I got off the plane, I knew I had to do something with it." A Piece of My Heart kicks off the twentiethanniversary season of New York's Manhattan Theatre Club.

JIM RASENBERGER