What is a heath?

 A heath generally refers to low, open wetlands. The word heath is more closely associated with Great Britain, South Africa, and Australia, but heaths exist worldwide. In America, the words marsh, swamp, and glade (or everglade) refer to the same types of land. 

In Lauren Gunderson’s The Heath, the playwright juxtaposes the struggles of her own grandfather, when he is in the late stages of Alzheimer’s disease, with those of Shakespeare’s King Lear. In Lear, the king rushes from a fight with his daughters into a raging thunderstorm on the heath. The elderly king proclaims the storm and the barren heath to be like the “storm” in his mind. Shakespeare makes the point that all humans, even kings, are vulnerable to the overpowering forces of nature, according to one source at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

In an interview with MRT, Gunderson explains her use of King Lear and the play’s storm in relation to her grandfather: “The storm represents the tumult and uncertainty of my grandfather’s Alzheimer’s disease, the damage that it can do to a family, the unpredictable sadness and ‘natural disaster’ of dementia.”

Since Shakespeare’s time (King Lear dates to 1606), the heath has served as a symbol of a haunted, bleak wasteland for countless British novelists, including Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights), Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Secret Garden), and Arthur Conan Doyle (The Hound of the Baskervilles).

For more on The Heath, visit Lauren’s Tumblr page at theheathplay.tumblr.com, full of  research and notes.

 

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The Heath runs February 13 – March 10, 2019.

mrt.org/theheath