Playwright Karin McCracken on Putting the Science of a Broken Heart on Stage in Heartbreak Hotel

Broken hearts are no small thing. In fiction, they’re often fatal; in reality, that emotional gutter can feel like something pretty close to it. Sometimes you can see it coming, sometimes it blindsides you. Either way, science backs up the whirlwind of emotions that heartbreak and grief can trigger – the dizzying shock, the breath-stealing sobs, the overwhelming sense that your body has turned against you. It’s as much a physiological experience as it is an emotional one.

That tragically common pain forms the backbone of Heartbreak Hotel, a two-performer show from EBKM, the award-winning partnership of Aotearoa New Zealand theatre makers Eleanor Bishop and Karin McCracken. For three years it’s toured in theatres and festivals all over the world and, this July, it returns to Victoria for a limited season at Arts Centre Melbourne. Part musical, part biology lesson and part personal therapy session, the show sees McCracken unpack heartbreak through both lived experience and scientific inquiry. We spoke with the writer and star about the unlikely ingredients behind the production.

Heartbreak Hotel follows a woman dealing with heartbreak after the abrupt ending of a long-term relationship. Dressed in Elvis-esque tassels and using a mix of classic breakup ballads and scientific spiels, she dissects the sensation of a broken heart in a story that emerged from a melting pot of the creators’ own experiences with grief.

“The art often feels better if there’s something of yourself in it,” says McCracken, explaining those personal sources. “It can be abstracted away from your own experience, but the more true it feels to you, the more true it’s going to feel to an audience.”

That authenticity extends to her co-star, Simon Leary, who plays the parts of multiple male friends and exes in the play, and “felt like a perfect part of the puzzle” once he joined the project, adding “tear-inducingly funny” levity to some of the sombre material.

That material is grounded in real research. One sequence re-creates McCracken’s own scientific deep dive into what heartbreak was doing to her body, including a visit to the doctor after what felt like a cardiac episode. “In all earnestness, the doctor was like, ‘I think you’re really sad’.”

Another scene born from her research is when she explains to the audience that the hormonal response to an unexpected breakup is comparable to the response of an impending bear attack – a comparison that sounds absurd until McCracken explains the biology behind it.

“So you can imagine what would happen to your body if you were in a bear attack, right? Cortisol is going to go through the roof, your body’s gonna be going through various physiological processes to engage your fight or flight,” she says. “All your other abilities get shunted to the side to enable your body to just engage those primal forces to fight or run. So that’s okay in a bear attack. But in the context of a breakup, you have to go to work in the morning. It’s an absolute fucking nightmare.”

With that precedent, McCracken elaborates that in Heartbreak Hotel the audience can see “how grief is showing up in our lives by more than just sort of being sad, because invariably the processing of it is going to be both psychological and physiological”. Considering that, and comparing it to the care you’d get after a bear attack, there’s not a lot of leniency in modern culture to support people experiencing this kind of grief. But Heartbreak Hotel wants its audience to know what they might be feeling is completely normal.

Those audiences have embraced the production across New Zealand, the Edinburgh Fringe, Off Broadway in New York and Melbourne’s own Rising Festival. Wherever the show travels, McCracken says people often linger afterwards to share stories of their own heartbreak.

“People would come up to us and be like, ‘So it’s been six months since the divorce...’,” she says. “Like, launch in, mid-story with Simon and I because we had just shared this emotional time with them.”

Despite performing around the world, Melbourne remains her favourite audience. “Last year at Rising was I think my favourite season we’ve ever done of the show.
And I think there’s lots of reasons for that.” For one, she says, Melburnians know how to fill out a theatre. But it’s also something less tangible. “Melbourne just tonally gets it. I’m genuinely fizzing to get back to Melbourne, to be honest.”

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