From the groundbreaking drama of ER to the personal and professional entanglements of Grey’s Anatomy and the high-stakes stories on The Pitt, audiences have long been drawn to stories about medical professionals — and patients — navigating life and death. Now, a new off-Broadway musical is bringing that drama to the New York stage.
The Heart, now playing through Dec. 6 at the Laura Pels Theatre, tells the story of a heart transplant and all the lives it touches, using an electronic-pop score and a 24-hour time frame to explore the tragedy and hope that intertwine when a young man’s death gives a woman a new chance at life.
For Anne and Ian Eisendrath — the married couple who wrote the show’s music and lyrics — that exchange between grief and hope was the story’s starting point. “The idea that on someone’s worst day they have this decision to give someone their best day,” Anne tells Gold Derby. “Exploring new life out of tragedy was something that was really interesting.”
Adds Ian: “A transplant touches so many people. The idea of a heart stopping in one person and beating in another person 24 hours later felt like this really great organizing dramatic principle.”
Adapted from the 2014 French novel Réparer less Vivants (Mend the Living), with a book and additional lyrics by Kait Kerrigan (The Great Gatsby), The Heart follows the titular organ from donor to recipient. When 19-year-old Simon (Nick T. Daly) is critically injured in an accident, his grieving parents (Joaquina Kalukango and Jason Tam) must make a choice: Simon wasn’t listed as an organ donor, but would he have wanted to be one? When they decide to move forward with donating his organs, a woman named Claire (Heidi Blickenstaff) gets a life-changing phone call after three years of waiting for a new heart.
“She has to shift gears from being this terminally ill person who is kind of surrendering to suddenly having hope,” Blickenstaff explains.
That evolution is reflected in the musical’s sound. EDM might seem like an unlikely genre for a musical about a heart transplant — or a musical in general — but for the Eisendraths, the style was a natural fit.
“We really wanted to tell a story with electronic music, and this was perfect because a hospital has so many sounds that deal with technology,” Anne explains.
The parallels go beyond the beeps of medical equipment. Simon is a surfer, and his girlfriend, Juliette (Max McKenna), is a DJ, giving the score a connection to ocean waves and nightclub beats as well as the hospital.
“There’s this connection between the wave of an EKG monitor, an actual wave, a sound wave,” Ian says. They all converge in the musical’s central theme: the beating of a heart.
That pulse carries through the production’s staging, too. Director Christopher Ashley (Come From Away) and choreographer Mandy Moore (Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour) created a world in which cast members remain onstage throughout the show, watching the action unfold even when their characters aren’t at the center of it. Clocks also keep the audience aware of the passage of time in a story where every moment counts.
Moore — whose work spans TV, film, music videos and concerts — says she likes to begin a project by asking questions about the story it’s telling and how the audience will feel after seeing it, and then uses that information to visualize a road map for her choreography. With The Heart specifically, the challenge was translating the rhythms of everyday life for the stage, like moving down a hospital hallway or the precision of an operating room.
“This show is really particular, because it’s not kicks and toes and jumps,” she explains. “Everyone is an actor, singer, mover, and my task is to take these very real-world situations and ‘danceify’ them.”
In adapting the source material for the stage, Kerrigan and the full creative team got the chance to highlight all the people who make a transplant possible beyond the donor and recipient. That community aspect was an important point for Kerrigan, who was excited to work on a true ensemble piece, because “you really get to see every actor to the fullest extent of their extraordinary talents, [and] I think we get to do that here in a way that is so unique to this story and the show.”
The transplant coordinator who walks Simon’s parents through the donation process (played by Lincoln Clauss) is also an opera singer, a detail that Kerrigan felt reveals a lot about the character. The team also reimagined the character of Cordelia (Bre Jackson), a nurse who watches over Simon and keeps him stable while his parents are faced with deciding what their son would have wanted.
“We went back to that initial idea that the story is about who is keeping this heart beating, and how are they keeping this heart beating?” Kerrigan notes. “Those nurses only have one to two patients when they’re in that kind of critical care, and realizing that that person spends their 12-hour shift just watching this person and keeping their body safe — it’s such an act of generosity, and that felt so connected to what we wanted to take away.”
This current production of The Heart brings together six returning cast members and three newcomers, allowing the show to build on its history while continuing to evolve. Some members of the ensemble, like Blickenstaff, have been with the production since its developmental stages, including an out-of-town run at San Diego’s La Jolla Playhouse last year. (As it happens, the musical is set in San Diego; Blickenstaff recalled visiting Tourmaline Beach, where Simon surfs, during the production’s run there.) Ashley says the team used the time between productions to deepen the central characters, particularly Simon’s mother, Marianne, whose story was reshaped around the question of what it means to let a child go.
“I think of the word ‘generosity,’” Kalukango says of what drew her to this particular role. “The idea that you receive the most devastating news possible, and then to have to make a decision about if you’re going to be generous enough with your child to share them, and does it change how you see your child in the world? It’s very beautiful.”
For Ashley, The Heart’s power lies in how audiences connect to it. Many have experienced the loss of a loved one or know someone who has donated or received an organ, he notes, so the show can become a way of seeing their own lives reflected onstage. He hopes audiences leave feeling “more generous, more connected.” Kerrigan also points to a Latin phrase invoked in the show: “non sibi sed omnibus,” which translates to “not for oneself, but for all,” as a reminder of the ways in which we’re all connected.
Blickenstaff hopes for something similarly heartening. “In these crazy times that we’re living in, where we’re so divided, this gorgeous show is really about our responsibility to each other as strangers,” she says. Her hope is that audiences carry that sense of connection into the world outside the theater — even if it means being “maybe a little nicer on the subway when they go home.”
