Purple Heart
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It seems to appear in the form of Purdy, a soft-spoken Vietnam vet who drops in one day to visit. Apparently a friend of Lars’s, Purdy is as maimed by the war physically as Carla is emotionally: his right hand was blown off by a land mine. Carla at first brushes him off as just one more well-wisher she’d just as soon do without, but gradually she finds herself drawn to the young man, whose polite demeanor masks a disdain for cant and convention as bitter as–and far more articulate than–her own. “What an astonishing volume of horseshit people expect you to swallow,” Purdy says. “All these respectable citizens trundling up to your front door with their enormous creaking carts full of shit…thinking that they are in fact hauling an equal quantity of diamonds.”
Purdy’s vulgar candor is a refreshing alternative to Grace’s banal pieties. And with Thor setting all the clocks in the house back an hour (it’s the last weekend of October), Purple Heart seems to signal that it’s time for a change in Carla’s life. With her and Purdy’s burgeoning relationship established, the play promises to be a heartwarming tale of how two of life’s walking wounded overcome their own pain and Grace’s oppressive moralizing to begin a new life together.
Alienation can be a useful didactic technique–by distancing the audience from the characters, a playwright can attempt to impart a social or political message. But Purple Heart offers no startling insight into the human condition. It puts onstage a set of dramatic cliches, then tears them down with a palpable, perverse pleasure. But the play’s climactic jumble of sexual and religious symbolism (“I’m innocent, Grace,” Carla cries as she’s hustled off to the hospital) suggests that Norris isn’t sure what to replace the cliches with–beyond the facile nihilism that currently cues the final blackout.
