Purple Heart

Bruce Norris

WHO    Purdy, twenties, an ex-Corporal, Vietnam veteran, American.

TO WHOM    Carla, a soldier’s widow.

WHERE    The living room of Carla’s home in a medium-sized city in the American Midwest.

WHEN    Late October, 1972.

WHAT HAS JUST HAPPENED    Carla’s husband has been killed in Vietnam. She has become an alcoholic. She lives with her son, Thor, and mother-in-law, Grace. The play begins at 6 p.m. one evening, just before the family are about to eat. Shortly after the start of the play, Purdy arrives unexpectedly. Carla and Grace do not know him and assume that he was a friend of Carla’s husband and that he has come to pay his respects. Purdy says to Carla, ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ and goes on to explain that they met in the military hospital where he was recovering, having lost his right hand in a landmine blast. She was in the same hospital being treated for shock, having blacked out following a visit to her dead husband’s coffin. She explains to Purdy that she cannot remember having met him and confesses that she was hospitalised because she had drunk too much. In a long monologue, she reveals the truth about her husband’s violent temper and the way in which he physically and emotionally abused her. She tells Purdy that, among his personal effects, she found a picture of her husband with a fourteen-year-old prostitute sitting on his lap and that it was hardly surprising that she went on a drinking binge. Purdy’s speech comes in response to her outpouring.

WHAT TO CONSIDER

•	The social, political and historical context. Take time to research the Vietnam War and the political debate it fuelled in America at the time.
•	At this point in the play, we assume that Purdy is an innocent victim of war. We will later discover that Purdy is not all that he seems. The ‘landmine’ story is questionable; he too, is a drinker, having lied about the fact; and in a dark twist to the story we come to understand that Purdy has raped Carla, while she was lying unconscious in the hospital. Carla has no memory of this and is now unknowingly pregnant by him.
•	Read the play to understand fully his motives and darker intentions. Knowledge of the play as a whole will enable you to find the layers required when playing the speech. It appears that he has Carla’s best interests at heart and that the story of the burning building is just a way to illustrate his point about not being judged or controlled. However, when you read on, the monologue takes on an altogether different and sinister meaning.
•	You will need to explore the underlying threat in order to add weight and menace to his character. Watch that you do not overdo it, however: he keeps his secrets well!
•	In the playtext, Carla has the line: ‘They go back because the burning building is beautiful.’ I have taken the liberty of giving it to Purdy as if he is repeating back what she has said to him, in order to complete the speech.

WHAT HE WANTS

•	To side with her. Not long after this speech, he says, ‘What an astonishing volume of horseshit people expect you to swallow. Do you know what I mean?’ and ‘I’m trying to say that it might be a good idea for you not to blame yourself so much.’
•	To gain her trust.
•	To test her, by seeing how far he can go before she remembers. Note how he too, like the arsonist, has returned to view the ‘damage’.
•	To seduce her.

KEYWORDS  negative  wrong  bad  selfish  greedy  conscience  soul  wickedness  mistake  love  perfect  beautiful  whip/whips

Purdy

May I make an observation? You seem to be the sort of person who has a lot of negative feelings about herself. You tend to feel like maybe you’ve done a lot of things wrong. Am I right about that? […] I say this because until recently I had very negative thoughts about myself. I had begun to think that all of the things that I wanted, all of the things that I enjoyed must be bad and that I must be a bad person for wanting them. It’s hard to say exactly why I felt this way. I don’t know. I never had a lot of friends, and my father would tell me, with some frequency, that I was a bad person. That I was selfish and greedy and thought only of myself, not of the other person, that I didn’t take the feelings of others into consideration, and that made me a bad person. And naturally I believed him because he was my father and why would your father tell you something that wasn’t true? So I said to him how am I supposed to become a better person? How do I achieve that? And he said simply listen to your conscience. And I was confused. I said is my conscience the same as my soul? No, he said, your conscience is different. Your conscience is a little angel that sits right here on your shoulder and he tells you when you’ve done something bad. It’s sitting there right now. It never goes to sleep and it never gets tired. I see. So I said what if you want to do something even though your conscience tells you not to? And he said that’s what we call wickedness. But I said, what if the conscience makes a mistake? What if it takes over and it makes you feel bad about everything you love? Everything perfect or beautiful? And he said it never makes a mistake. Never, I said? He said think about this: he said why do you think people who set a building on fire always come back to the scene of the crime? Why else would they do that? They don’t want to go to jail, do they? No, their conscience makes them come back. He said their conscience knows it was wrong, and it has a little tiny whip and it whips them and whips them until they go back to that burning building to see how wicked they were. And I thought about this for a few seconds. I really had to think. Because that didn’t seem right to me. So I thought about it very hard and after a few seconds I turned to him and I said – [They go back because the burning building is beautiful.] That’s exactly what I said. I didn’t get my allowance that week.