The Heart Is a Peopled Wound

By T.E. Kalem

Freud argued that suicide is the would-be murder of another person deflected against the self. Could the reverse be true? Might a murder be a suicide performed upon someone else? Such is one tentative meaning that could be derived from Marguerite Duras' simultaneously luminous and opaque play, A Place Without Doors, which is having its U.S. premiere at New Haven's Long Wharf Theater. Another tentative meaning might be that life is a mystery on a scale that reduces the solution of a murder to the pettiest of puzzles. Since Marguerite Duras is a French novelist and a scenarist (Hiroshima, Mon Amour), still another specifically Gallic meaning to be drawn from her play is that the heart has its reasons that reason knows not of.

The evening begins with a documentary tape. A voice announces that on April 8, 1966, a piece of a human body was found on a railway car in France. Other pieces were found but never the head. By analyzing railway intersections, the Paris police discovered that all of the trains involved passed under the same bridge in the small commune of Viorne near Paris. A housewife in the district, Claire Amelie Lannes, 51, was confronted by detectives and at once confessed to the murder of her deaf-and-dumb cousin and housekeeper. In point of fact, A Place Without Doors was inspired by a slightly different case. In December 1949, a 51-year-old housewife killed her husband with a hatchet and chopped him up into many pieces which she threw off a bridge (Pont de la Montagne Pavee) near Corbeil.

The play takes an almost maddeningly undramatic form. The first act consists of an interrogation of the murderer's husband (Richard A. Dysart) by a man who stands in the shadows and is known as The Questioner (Alvin Epstein). In the second act he interrogates Claire Lannes (Mildred Dunnock). The husband is a dull, evasive clod of a businessman, and the first act is enough of an ordeal to put a playgoer's patience in doubt. The second act redeems all. As certain healers are adept at touching the body to ease pain. Playwright Duras is skilled at touching a woman's psyche to expose pain. And love, and loathing--the heart's peopled wound. And a claustrophobically confined intelligence. A Place Without Doors really lies in the land of Hedda Gabler.

The sensitive, edgy, intuitive neurasthenic heroine is really a self-inquisitioner who pares away one after another of life's enigmas without revealing a single motive for her crime. The plaints she registers against the cousin-housekeeper are that she was silent, efficient, clean, ate and slept well, and "was too fat for the house." This is rather like the killer in Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, who murdered his victim because he could not stand his clouded blue eye. With power and wonder, both Poe and Duras show us that an act may be most distinctively human and lifelike precisely because it is logically motiveless.

For Mildred Dunnock, this is the apex of a distinguished theatrical career. She has abandoned every suggestion of the fluttery, eccentric demialcoholic spinster who at times seemed in perpetual quest of another Tennessee Williams play. Her hands sculpture the silence with disciplined eloquence. Her voice whispers with the morning mists, rages with the noon sun and keens the elegy of twilight. She makes an entire life pattern evolve before one's eyes like the organic cycle of the seasons, each mood, tone and thought blending seamlessly into the next. It is a stunning performance in a matchless role. T.E. Kalem

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