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Here’s what can happen when your heart gets broken.
Reeling with the shock of a relationship break up norepinephrine, a hormone and neurotransmitter that increases heart rate and blood pressure, floods your body so you’re in fight or flight mode. Your cortisol levels can go up; so might your dopamine levels. Your ability to fight viruses goes down, which explains why people frequently get sick when they’re in the initial stages of a break-up.
After this protest – or shock and denial - phase, things shift. You might be angry and resentful; you might want to bargain or negotiate with your ex. Your norepinephrine and cortisol levels start to drop, which is good, but dopamine and serotonin, the things that make you feel good, drop too.
Now you might sink into depression. For many people, this will pass as there’s acceptance, personal growth and moving on. But others might stay stuck in this malaise; albeit rare, a tiny percentage might develop takotsubo cardiomyopathy or broken-heart syndrome, when a person experiences severe emotional or physical stress to the extent it interrupts the way their heart pumps blood and they think they’re having a heart attack.
While all this is going on, your dearest and nearest might be wondering why you’re so upset and why you’re not picking up the pieces of your life, moving on, still taking it so hard, etc etc. After all, there’s plenty more fish in the sea.
Actor Karin McCracken knows this because she’s lived it. Six years after a serious long-term relationship broke up, McCracken was still grieving. Because she makes theatre, McCracken decided the logical thing to do was to create a play.
Heartbreak Hotel - now on at Wellington’s Circa Theatre to be followed by performances at the Nelson and Tauranga Arts Festivals - mixes story, science and a synthesizer to consider what happens when we get dumped. It’s grounded in science and studded with classic break-up songs and razor-sharp observations on the physiology of love.
For an experience that most people will endure, McCracken says there’s remarkably little in the way of material about how to care for yourself when you’re heartbroken.
“There’s the standard advice about taking your time, moving on, healing and waiting it out but I don’t think there’s a healthy culture around recovering from heartbreak,” she says, stressing that the relationship depicted in Heartbreak Hotel is not her own but a fictionalised one.
“I think the other thing is that people think it’s a binary and that you’re either heartbroken or you’re not. I don’t think that’s true. I was living this life where it was like, ‘I’m functioning. My career is going pretty well. I have lots of friends, but I’m not letting go of this huge part of my life, which is preventing me from doing other things’.
“So, I decided to look at this, to actually analyse and pull it apart. I was like, ‘I need some science. I need anchoring in fact’, because much [of the material] was ephemeral and subjective.”
EBKM, the theatre company writer and performer McCracken founded with director and writer Eleanor Bishop, set to work. Their kind of theatre is socially-minded, innovative and contemporary, made to be of use as well as to entertain. It means they like to do extensive research, consult with social agencies, academics and would-be audiences, and collaborate over the long-term with backstage creatives and performers.
It might sound earnest, but the results are not. Take Yes Yes Yes, a show EBKM made for teens and aimed at preventing sexual violence by delving into the issues surrounding young people, relationships, sex and consent. McCracken was working as a specialist educator in sexual violence prevention when it was made.
When I saw an early version of Yes Yes Yes, I thought I’d be bored and frustrated by being lectured at as the stage was used like a pulpit. It turned out to be one of the best things I saw that year – 2019 – because it was smart, amusing, down-to-earth and impeccably well produced and acted.
It is not surprising that Yes Yes Yes continues to tour the world. So far, audiences all over New Zealand and in Australia, Canada, the US, Serbia, Iceland, Germany and the UK have seen Yes Yes Yes. It’s been translated and licensed by companies in Wales and Catalonia, with forthcoming translations from Brazil and Hungary.
Actor Hannah Kelly has now been trained to perform it, so McCracken can make other work – like Heartbreak Hotel. There’s a loose connection between the two shows. Both are about relationships and both deal with things that we’re not raised to discuss, says McCracken.
“I didn’t have a very functional complete view of myself outside of a relationship,” she admits. “and so of course, if that’s taken from you, your whole identity is challenged. Your place in the world is challenged, so it becomes quite existential...”
So far, Heartbreak Hotel has been performed in Auckland, at RISING Festival in Melbourne, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and London’s Soho Theatre. There’s humour, McCracken stresses, as well as lo-fi covers of classic breakup songs, depictions of awkward Tinder dates and attempts at a fresh start. Hilarious and poignant have been used to describe the show.
She takes a break in November to travel to New Hampshire to take up a MacDowell Fellowship. She’ll spend four weeks working on EBKM’s next show.
What she won’t be feeling is heartbroken.
“It took a long time and I don’t want to deride it because it was really a special, formative part of my life. I learned such a huge amount about being in the world from that relationship, so I’ve come to a place where I’m extremely grateful and extremely happy to have had my ex-partner in my life.”
Heartbreak Hotel is on at Wellington’s Circa Theatre until Saturday, October 25. Yes Yes Yes is at the Nelson Arts Festival at the Suter Theatre on Thursday, October 23, followed by Heartbreak Hotel at the Theatre Royal on Tuesday, October 28 before the show heads to the Tauranga Arts Festival (Saturday, November 1).
