Voices from the deep

From left, the cast of Burgess Clark’s “Purple Hearts”: Ryan Serhant (as Lewis), Kevin T. Collins (as Captain Whitman), Dan Patrick Brady (as Spooner), Rebecca White (as Cassie) and Anneka Fagundes (as Joanne). It enters previews at the Gene Frankel Theater September 5.

By Jerry Tallmer

The Japanese slugged at least six torpedoes into her, maybe more, that Sunday morning, but when the USS West Virginia sank at her mooring on December 7, 1941, it was only into 40 feet of water, so the superstructure remained aloft, including the mast that would one day find itself installed as a memorial on the campus of the University of West Virginia at Morgantown.

That’s what Burgess Clark, the son of a professor there, remembers from his youth. It was some years later, as a graduate student and then as an educator himself at the University of Hawaii, that Clark began thinking hard about what it must have been like for the men trapped inside the battleship beneath the water line — living on for at least three weeks until the oxygen gave out.

He would put that thrust of the imagination into a play, “Purple Hearts,” which would wend its way for 20 years from the Kumu Kahua (“New Works”) Theater in Honolulu to well-received productions in Los Angeles, Kansas City, and Edinburgh to — now, at last — an opening September 8 (previews start September 5) at Off-Broadway’s Gene Frankel Theater on Bond Street in this city.

“Yes, absolutely, it certainly does [have parallels],” Clark said late last week of the overtones between the entrapment of the three doomed men in his play and the Utah coal-mine tragedy that was getting worse even as we talked. A further reverberation: even more grievously lost at Pearl Harbor was, of course, the USS Utah.

The three able-bodied seamen of “Purple Hearts” — caught by chance in one compartment — are Whitman (tense, self-involved, religious), Lewis (young, optimistic, innocent), and Spooner (older, burnt out, cynical).

“It’s a dramatic representation,” said Clark — not the real thing, because nobody knows the real thing, nor even the real names of these and however many others perished in similar slow-death circumstances at Pearl Harbor. Well, the U.S. Navy presumably knows, but the U.S. Navy has locked the real names up for 100 years, until 2041, on the grounds of public and private morale, or whatever.

Burgess Clark — born June 1, 1961, in Morgantown — is today the director of education of the North Shore Music Festival in Beverly, Massachusetts. It was from there that he also last week said: “All three of those men represent, to me, how I’d face that situation. One is how I’d like to face it: that’s Spooner, the cynic. And one is what I fear I’d be like: Whitman, who goes crazy.”

Lewis, the young innocent, apparently doesn’t count, but it was in fact an actor named Ryan Serhant, playing Lewis in a workshop reading of “Purple Hearts” at the New Noises Festival in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, who then brought the play to the attention of David Epstein, artistic director of the Invisible City Theater Company and, now, director of this New York production.

Ryan Serhant still plays Lewis. Kevin T. Collins is Whitman. Dan Patrick Brady is Spooner. The three women in their lives are played by Anneka Fagundes, Rebecca White, and Cecilla Frontero.

It was while Burgess Clark was in Hawaii in the 1980s that he got involved with the Pearl Harbor Historical Society, and met and interviewed some of the WW II veterans who had been on the scene at Pearl Harbor. This led to his writing a first draft of “Purple Hearts” in 1984, as an exercise, while still a graduate student.

“Actually, one gentleman I talked with had been on the West Virginia and had known three men who were trapped like this.” Clark also interviewed a number of Pearl Harbor survivors who had been on salvage operations and could hear tappings and bangings, another coalmine parallel — “We’re alive! Save us!” — coming from within the sunken ships.

“The salvage guys told their commanding officers, who said: ‘Go where you can’t hear it.’ The cause was deemed hopeless. And where a few of the rescuers did get through, cut through the hulls with blow torches, they found the men inside all dead, asphyxiated by the blow-torch fumes.”

The greatest praise Clark has had is from people who tell him: “You’ve put a human face on a historic event.” He was living here during another visceral event – September 11, six years ago.

Forty feet underwater or 1,300 feet into the sky — trapped is trapped.

PURPLE HEARTS. By Burgess Clark. Directed by David Epstein. An Invisible City Theatre Company production, entering previews September 5 toward a September 8 opening at the Gene Frankel Theatre, 24 Bond Street, (212) 352-3101.