Synopsis

 

Heartbreaker is an existential comedy, loosely based on the life of the legendary Swedish tenor Jussi Bjorling (1911-1960), a man who sang with such “ecstasy…that, 40 years after his death, he is still able to reduce us to tears.”*

 

There are three parallel plot lines. The first plot tracks the unnamed SINGER’s internalized will-struggle with his dead father, whom he ostensibly adored. The second tracks the bumpy but passionate love story of the Singer and his WIFE, a diva-manqué whose desire for a predictable and orderly life coexists uneasily with her desire for desire. These two plots are connected by a frame in which the Singer interacts with a fastidious young male WRITER who is ghosting the alcoholic Singer’s autobiography.

 

Although the play begins surrealistically with a death-that-is-not-a-death, the Act I frame story, set in 1946 at the Singer’s summer home in the Stockholm archipelago, seems to be a traditional, linear narrative at first. Its solidity is gradually compromised, however, not only by inter-cut memory sequences but by strange skips, repeats, gaps, and anachronistic intrusions. It gradually becomes apparent that the summer home sits inside a larger, surrealistic set that seems to be a bar, which, in turn, is enclosed by a shimmering world of water and light.

 

In Act II, the frame narrative world falls away. The Singer finds himself outside of normal timespace in a kind of rehearsal hall of the soul: a Bar and Grille inhabited by ENRICO CARUSO and Swedish-American ventriloquist EDGAR BERGEN who function as the Singer’s surrogate fathers. After a climactic encounter with a Mephistophelean 21st century psycho-pharmacologist (DOCTOR DOKTOR) who tempts him with a Faustian bargain, the Singer achieves a measure of peace and existential understanding. Although he is subsequently stripped of that understanding and thrust back into the chaos of his life, his ability to “remember the things we do not remember” allows him to negotiate a happy ending with his wife.  In its final scenes, the play circles back to the opening death scene, transforming it into a libestod.

 

As the possibility of “remembering the things we do not remember” suggests, the play is built around a set of existential paradoxes: paradoxes about strength and weakness, intelligence and stupidity, brokenness and wholeness--indeed, brokenness as wholeness. This curious notion, what the Japanese call wabi, is first suggested by the head-quote, from a song by Leonard Cohen: “There’s a crack in everything/ That’s how the light gets in.” In a sense, the play exists to explain the meaning of that line.

 

 

CONTACT INFORMATION:

                                      Nancy Steffen Fluhr

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steffen@njit.edu or steffen@optonline.net