"Organic Shrapnel," a new play by Charles Cissel, is about the loss we carry with us after a devastating event. It explores the lives of three sons as they cycle through death, war, and one girlfriend (yes, one). One brother joins a war to escape the death of his twin, only to become wounded with “organic shrapnel,” bone fragments of a suicide bomber buried within him. This shrapnel continues to haunt him even after the war is over, becoming a metaphor for the ghost of his twin.

The first act of the play is largely anticlimactic. Three brothers sit on three swings and discuss life. Inside, their mother wonders about the size of their genitalia (“Those boys. Different sizes, small, medium, large. Interesting”). Tension builds in the family after the youngest son dies. The play's poetic tendencies are sometimes labored. The dialogue is clipped, sometimes disjointed. The characters often speak in one-word sentences, such as in a dinner scene when one brother gets up to leave by saying, "Shut up. I think I hate family dinners. Done." He is told by his girlfriend, "Stay."

The crux of the play comes in the third act, when DB, the surviving twin, comes home from the war and begins to expel pieces of bone from his bomber. He is angry, feeling that the war should have been left behind. Organic shrapnel becomes a symbol for carrying the ghost of someone inside of you. DB loves his brother’s old girlfriend, CC, but worries that she will never be able to see him. He knows that when CC touches him, she is really touching the ghost of her dead boyfriend. He tells his brother’s ghost, "I don’t know, she’d be kissing me, thinking she’s kissing you, then I become you, kissing her, that had kissed you, then I’d be kissing you."

DB is in pain over his brother, a pain that he tried to curb by going to war. He returns and the war is still going strong. He learns that he can't stop the war, just as he can't stop the pain he feels for his brother. It's too big for him. The only way for him to get over the pain of losing his brother is to learn to accept that as long as he lives, his brother will live within him.

"Organic Shrapnel" has a slow beginning, but if you’re willing to invest the time in these characters, it has an emotional catharsis that’s worth the wait. It’s a touching play about how war changes us in seemingly invisible ways.