La Jolla Playhouse’s ‘The Heart’ to follow a lifeline through story and sound

If the heart is the life force of the human body then electronic dance music, or EDM, is the life force of “The Heart,” a world-premiere musical opening in previews Tuesday at La Jolla Playhouse.

“I do think this is the first musical that is fully based in this genre of music,” said Ian Eisendrath (music supervisor/arranger for “Come From Away”), who with his wife Anne Eisendrath composed the score for this bold new production that’s about 24 hours in the life of a heart transplant. “It’s music that makes you feel, makes you dance. Music that gives a real energy to this show, even though it’s about something that’s so tragic. But it’s also about life’s constancy.”

“The Heart” is an adaptation for the stage by Kait Kerrigan of French author Maylis de Kerangal’s 2014 novel of medical fiction “Reparer les Vivants” (“Mend the Living”). Set by Kerrigan in San Diego, it’s the story of a young surfer, Simon Lamar, who after a car accident lies in an inoperable coma. Over the course of 24 hours his still-beating heart awaits a recipient.

“The beautiful thing about a transplant,” said Christopher Ashley, the production’s director and the Playhouse’s longtime artistic director, “is it’s the end of one life and the new chapter of another. We decided to set it in San Diego, which includes all the amazing medical establishment here and the sort of surfer culture and the ocean and so many things about how life is also a wave.”

“It’s an electronic score that is built on four centers of gravity with the sounds of the hospital, the sounds of a club (where Simon’s girlfriend is a DJ), the sounds of the ocean and the sounds of the human heart,” Ashley said.

Besides Ashley, Kerrigan and the Eisendraths, the creatives behind this 90-minute production include choreographer Mandy Moore, a recent Emmy nominee for her work on the Oscars telecast last March. Among the cast is Heidi Blickenstaff (“Freaky Friday” in La Jolla), Zachary Noah Piser (“Redwood” in La Jolla and on Broadway) and Paul Alexander Nolan (the Playhouse’s “Escape to Margaritaville” and “Jesus Christ Superstar”).

The beginnings of “The Heart,” to some extent, date back nearly 10 years. Ashley recalled an earlier collaboration with the Eisendraths that never came to fruition: “Ian and Anne and I almost a decade ago worked on a musical about a heart transplant with very different underlying material.”

Later, he said, “Kait came into the conversation and found this beautiful novel. It’s a gorgeous story, very much opening up a lot of the kinds of questions we were interested in and asking about.”

For Kerrigan, “I was really attracted to the fact that the story takes place in 24 hours, which can be thrilling onstage, and to the idea of talking about a transplant and being able to create a piece of theater that uses an ensemble cast of characters playing multiple roles – it feels like they’re putting their own hearts into a variety of characters.”

In adapting “The Heart” for the stage, Kerrigan has enjoyed “good conversations” with novelist De Kerangal and, in the process, “seen the way in which different characters take the main journey of the story and diving into their personal lives. It felt like a beautiful opportunity to talk about the way in which your daily life interacts with something larger and figuring out how we can connect those two — the daily and the larger experience of what it means to be alive every day.”

In this way, the story of the musical functions on two interrelated levels. “It’s very much connected,” Kerrigan said, “to both the heart as a physical object and something you require in order to live every day and pump blood through your body and also to the more metaphorical, emotional side of that.”

The heartbeat of the show is its score. Co-composer of music and lyrics Anne Eisendrath recalled embracing the electronic genre during her “coming-of-age time in the early ’90s when dance music was really blowing up.”

“Then about five years ago, during the pandemic I rediscovered dance music as an adult after having studied theory and all that. I started thinking about how the journey of a dance song has all of these rises and falls, and is very dramatic. When we (she and Ian) were studying this story with Kait and the hospital world, we discovered a way to use it.”

Said Ashley: “It’s a kind of music that’s meant to go into your body and be felt by your body. The the medical equipment (in the hospital) and sound equipment (in the club) are similar. It’s the technology of healing people and the technology of making sounds.”

Ian Eisendrath pointed out the “crazy connection” between “club beats, which are 120 per minute and the heartbeat, which is 60 bpm. This is a nonstop show. It feels like once you start it’s just one big buildup to the end. A four-on-the-floor EDM kick. You’ve got all of these levels of production in music today that are literal and organic. There’s a need for organic instruments for sure, but there’s so much more we can use in the world.”

Ashley characterizes the tone of “The Heart” as both “exciting and tricky. There’s simultaneously life and death, and also all of the tiny details of living in hospitals and of people’s cellphones. The tiny and the enormous coexist all the way through the show.”

“It looks like it’s happening on some combination of a club and an operating room. A couple of key set and prop elements transform all night long. It turns out to be about the people, the music and the story far more than about literal, naturalistic stuff.”

The story’s connective thread, said Kerrigan, is “whoever is keeping the heart beating. The weird logic of the whole piece is that we don’t care about anything else. We are allowed to go into the humanity of every one of these people onstage (some 50 to 60 characters are portrayed).”

“There’s something beautiful about being able to stay inside of that 24-hour period because it allows the audience to focus in and not feel overwhelmed, and at the same time to see more humanity, more of the things that drive these people forward.”

At the same time, said Anne Eisendrath, there is “the heart, the organ that pumps our blood, that is so central to keeping everything going. Yet there’s this mystical thing about it that we’re all drawn to.”

‘The Heart’

When: Previews, Tuesday, Aug. 19, through Aug. 30. Opens Aug. 31 and runs through Sept. 28. 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 1 and 7 p.m. Sundays

Where: La Jolla Playhouse’s Sheila and Hughes Potiker Theatre, 2910 La Jolla Village Drive, UC San Diego, La Jolla

Tickets: $30-$119

Phone: 858-550-1010

Online: lajollaplayhouse.org