The first act and a half of Bruce Norris's "Purple Heart" creates a world as close to real life as the theater ever gets. The relationships are involving, the dialogue well-heard, the occurrences surprising but persuasive-and then Norris ruins it all. A master of suggestion, scattering throughout the play elegant hints about what happened or might be about to happen, the playwright proves to be all thumbs when it comes to dealing with the truth. The result is a denouement so stagy-so filled with melodrama and reversal-that it suggests the moment in The Fantasticks when the characters' smiles begin to falter under the relentless glare of the stage lights. Perhaps Norris's point is that everything always turns out false-but (Brecht aside) no one wants a play whose purpose is to announce that plays are a fraud.
More likely, he simply found truth-or heart-more than he could bear. The play traces the one-day development of an appealing off-beat romance between Carla, the foul-mouthed hard-drinking recent widow of a Vietnam veteran, and Purdy, one of his tight-assed fellow Marines. In the real life Norris and director Anna D. Shapiro have taken such pains to create, a relationship like this might not work out for a thousand small reasons, or even a couple of big ones, namely, Carla's interfering mother-in-law and inconsolable son. Why pull the audience away from those realities-which, however painful, have their compensation-to a Grand Guignol world of betrayal and reversal? Did Norris think that without blood and creepy sex it wouldn't be a real Steppenwolf show?
Fortunately the actors remain firmly grounded in the real, even when the script takes its sudden unfortunate turn to the pointlessly weird. Christopher Evan Welch is magnificent as the unlikely knight in khaki armor, managing the transition from apparent automaton to low-key subversive with particular grace, and holding on to his dignity even when the script requires him to disintegrate from subversion to perversion. Most likely Carla was written for Laurie Metcalf: the role calls for her patented kook-with-a-heart-of-gold-and-an-unpredictable-temper thing, which she delivers with relish and skill. As Grace, the infuriating and intrusive mother-in-law, stalwart Rosemary Prinz is duly infuriating and intrusive, but instead of developing for good or ill she gets shoved aside in the final plot twist. 8th-grader Nathan Kiley does a wonderful job as Carla's son, telling vile jokes and tossing around plastic vomit to express his rage and sorrow at the loss of his father.
It's one of the great plots of the world: a stranger arrives and something changes. That's the play inside Purple Heart-the one where the encounter with Purdy will somehow move Carla from the paralyzed misery of her loss to whatever's going to be next in her life. But it's cheating to handle "somehow" by making Purdy so weird that Carla runs screaming from the room. If he's willing to go back and try again for that last half an act, Norris might finish the really great play he began.