Heartless

Set in a palatial home situated high above Los Angeles, “Heartless” concerns a fractured family whose dark secrets emerge with the arrival of a hapless interloper: Roscoe, a 65-year-old classics professor who’s left his wife and taken up with the decades-younger Sally.

Even though he comes bearing a goodwill offering of jelly doughnuts, Roscoe is hardly embraced by Sally’s bitter older sister Lucy or the sisters’ wheelchair-bound mother, Mable, whose infirmity hasn’t diminished her ferocious temper.
“Stop calling me ma’am all the time,” she snaps at Roscoe’s attempt at politeness. “Feels like we’re in ‘Gone With the Goddamn Wind.’ ”

As the play lugubriously unfolds, nothing really happens beyond Shepard’s usual blend of magical realism and heavy-handed symbolism. Sally has a long scar down her chest, dating back to a childhood heart transplant from a young murder victim. One of the characters may or may not be a ghost. Mabel’s dutiful nurse, previously described as mute, suddenly begins talking. When she returns from a jog, her feet are covered in blood.

“I run when I’ve come to the end of my rope,” she explains.