Written by John Winters   

Mystery lies at the heart of the best of Sam Shepard’s plays. This is true of the latest from the Pulitzer Prize winner, “Heartless,” which is now playing at the Pershing Square Signature Center in New York.

Ostensibly the story of a “rootless” 65-year-old academic who finds himself thrust into a family of women living high above “the abyss” of Los Angeles, the play examines ideas about family dynamics and identity.

This is the familiar turf for Shepard; the twist here is that it’s not a father-son dyad or a pair of ruthless brothers at the center of the story but a domineering mother and her two quirky daughters. In Shepard’s best work the flow of testosterone often gets the better of his characters, resulting in violence, real or threatened, and the revelation of long-buried secrets. “Heartless” is relatively tame, but there is a secret, only it’s hard to be sure exactly what it is or what it means.

The professor, Roscoe (Gary Cole), has left his longtime wife and taken up with Sally (Julianne Nicholson), the younger of the two daughters, and wakes to find himself in the midst of a long-raging storm of familial conflict, past and present. Sally, we learn, underwent a heart transplant as a child, hence the play’s title. Mable, the mother, played by the irascible Lois Smith, is wheelchair bound, and is cared for by the eldest daughter, Lucy (Jenny Bacon), who is clearly trapped by circumstances.

Rounding out the cast is Betty Gilpin as Elizabeth, a nurse who also tends to Mable but who inexplicably went mute.

And herein lies the mystery.

As he fills the stage with banter that slyly reveals the backstories and personalities of the characters, and also allows poor Roscoe to get the third degree from Mable, Shepard begins to hint at an actual storyline. Twice in the play, Sally seems to be speaking to the ghost of the murdered girl whose heart she now carries inside her. Meanwhile, a subsequent conversation with the previously mute nurse would seem to indicate we may have a ghost in the house, perhaps intent on coming back to claim her long-lost organ. Adding to the mystery is a monologue from Mable, where she glosses a few Greek dramas while discussing the protective ferocity of mothers, thereby hinting she may have played a role in the murder of the girl whose heart now beats inside her own daughter.

Near the end, Lucy is apparently dipping into her mother’s meds and seems ready to finally take wing and escape this cuckoo’s nest, just as Roscoe, too, has finally had enough. “I’ve never seen such a house full of wackos!” he shouts, as he tries to pack and leave.

As entertaining as it is to listen to Shepard’s dialogue, parse the action for possible meaning, and watch the fine performances, the play seems to lack any plausible answers to its own mystery. Resolution may not be a necessity in modern drama, especially in the work of Shepard, but watching “Heartless” one gets the feeling that the center is missing. Whether you are O.K. with this or not will determine your reaction to the play.

While Shepard pulls out some of his usual pitches hoping to land some over the plate, it seems his fastball never makes it out of the glove. The sense of haunted unreality he typically creates so convincingly never fully materializes. Instead, we are left with a group of odd, sometimes annoying, characters who seem to be trying to tell us something but somehow can’t. Hence, we never really care about them. It’s as if “Heartless” is neither straight enough nor strange enough to allow its fuzzy story to fully register.

Director Daniel Aukin sets the play against Eugene Lee’s all black set that consists of a slanted roof upstage, two beds, a patio set and two small palm trees. It convincingly provides a metaphorical nowhere, indicative of the characters’ shared plight. While the director keeps the riffs flying and builds to a cacophonous crescendo in the second act, it somehow feels as if it’s all for naught.

This isn’t to say that “Heartless” isn’t interesting to watch and at times very funny. It just leaves you pondering an imponderable, hoping to find some semblance of an answer that may not be there.
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“Heartless” by Sam Shepard is at the Pershing Square Signature Theatre in New York through Sept. 30. For more information log on to www.signaturetheatre.org.

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