Theatre in Review: The Heidi Chronicles (Music Box Theatre)

	Elisabeth Moss, Jason Biggs. Photo: Joan Marcus

It has been more than a quarter of a century since we first made the acquaintance of Heidi Holland, art historian, essayist, and symbol of a generation -- and, like every other Baby Boomer, she's not getting any younger. You could say the same for the play in which she figures so prominently: Playwright Wendy Wasserstein was hailed as a pioneering feminist voice, but The Heidi Chronicles, which seemed so "now" in 1989, is frankly getting a little creaky in the joints. Without the patina of its original novelty, its flaws are all the more evident. Let's just say that Heidi is back -- as funny, touching, and frustrating as ever.

The Heidi Chronicles traces its eponymous heroine over 24 years of whiplash-inducing social change. We first meet Heidi in Chicago, 1965, when she connects with gay friend-for-life Peter Patrone; next, we catch up with her in Manchester, New Hampshire, during the 1968 presidential primary, when she first falls into the clutches of the ever-striving, and faintly unscrupulous, Scoop Rosenbaum. Both men will remain in her orbit as the years go by, while Heidi pursues her intellectual career, watching in quiet dismay as the feisty feminist movement of the '60s is corrupted into the greedy, gaudy, self-obsessed spree of the Reagan years.

Wasserstein, who was known for her humorous essays, always had a knack for throwaway wisecracks, and many a line in The Heidi Chronicles cleverly lays bare the world in which the author's well-bred overachievers dwell. Peter, "a small noise from Winnetka," cultivates Heidi by noting that any girl who (like her) sits on the sidelines of the school dance reading Death Be Not Proud is definitely his type: "Bored, depressed, anxious: These are the qualities I look for in a woman." Later, Peter, having come out of the closet, announces that he is dating "a child psychiatrist from Johns Hopkins -- but he's thinking of quitting to study with Merce Cunningham." On meeting Scoop, editor of the Liberated Earth News, Heidi wonders if he is a radical. He replies, "How could I be a radical? I played lacrosse at Exeter and I'm a Jew whose first name is Scoop."

Each of the play's scenes is a sharp-eyed comedy sketch nailing a different moment in Heidi's progress through changing times -- when she reluctantly joins the participants in a "consciousness-raising rap group" to spill the messy details of her life; when she is mortified to find herself guesting on a TV talk show, caught between a pontificating Scoop and a heckling Peter; or when a reunion with her best friend, Susan, turns into an impromptu pitch meeting for a sitcom that would draw on Heidi's art world expertise. ("What we're interested in is, say, a way-out painter, an uptight curator, and a dilettante heiress in a loft.")

Wasserstein was first out of the gate with her portrait of boomer women who were well-educated, idealistic, and shaped by the utopian ideas of the '60s -- but who learned, to their dismay, that many, if not most, young men were looking not for comrades-in-arms but superwives and mothers who could schedule their personal achievements while hauling the kids off to soccer practice and whipping up nourishing, low-calorie meals. As Scoop warns, "That's why you 'quality time' girls are going to be one generation of disappointed women. Interesting, exemplary, even sexy, but basically unhappy."

Nevertheless, the play's awkward construction hobbles Heidi's story, pushing her to the sidelines of too many scenes and threatening to leave her a minor character in her own story. And Wasserstein was apparently conflicted, torn between the desire to score mordant points about a world rigged against women of achievement and the need to win audiences over with another winsome laugh line. Heidi's romantic problems are barely dramatized, reduced to a series of references to men passing through her life, none of whom we see. In Pam MacKinnon's production, her obsession with Scoop, who cheats on her then leaves her for a photogenic Jewish Southern belle, is especially mysterious, because Jason Biggs lacks the electric energy that Peter Friedman originally brought to the role; the play never adequately explains what she sees in this prince of entitlement. (Biggs improves in the later scenes, when Scoop starts to feel the tug of middle-aged disillusionment, but he never displays much chemistry with Elisabeth Moss' Heidi.)

In the play's most celebrated scene, Heidi, giving a speech at her old high school, melts down, confessing her disappointment with a feminism that fizzled: "It's just that I feel stranded. And I thought the whole point was that we wouldn't feel stranded. I thought the point was we were all in this together." Fair enough, but, in scene after scene, we've witnessed Heidi standing to the side, looking uncomfortable, edging away from a candid lesbian, and getting into an argument with the leader of a demonstration. The lady basically commits to nothing but her career all night long; when her big speech arrives, it doesn't feel earned, because the groundwork hasn't been laid for it. There's more going on inside Heidi than her creator wants to discuss; at one point Heidi muses, "Do you ever think what makes you a person is also what keeps you from being a person?" A provocative thought, no? Too bad there's no follow-up to it.

Moss has starred on Broadway before, but this is the first time she has been asked to carry the entire evening, and she gives Heidi a slightly tough, coolly analytical quality that compares well with Joan Allen, who created the role. Moss needs to work on her voice, however -- it's all head tones, with a rather pinched quality -- and her rather flat-affect line readings seem more designed for television, where she has spent most of her career. She does establish a real rapport with Bryce Pinkham, whose Peter cracks wise proficiently while also acting as her moral compass. Peter figures in the play's two most honest scenes -- when Heidi reacts frostily to news of Peter's sexuality, forcing her to admit that he isn't "desperately and hopelessly in love" with her, and, later, when he furiously calls her out for not supporting him during the hideous early plague years of the AIDS crisis.

There are also fine contributions from Ali Ahn as best friend Susan, who starts as a giggly, man-hungry coed, passes through a radical lesbian phase, and ends up a glossy Hollywood producer; Leighton Bryan, as Scoop's steel-magnolia spouse; and Elise Kibler, amusing as a sweet young thing who assures Heidi and Susan that she has heard of women's collectives -- in her women's studies course at Brown. However, the evening is nearly pocketed by the fast-rising Tracee Chimo, who is hilarious as, among others, the toughest-talking lesbian in Ann Arbor ("You think Jane Wyatt demanded clitoral stimulation from Robert Young? No fuckin' way!") and as a terrifyingly slick talk-show host who speaks entirely in trendy clichés.

The set designer, John Lee Beatty, has neatly solved the problem of a play that covers 25 years and 12 locations, combining a white box with a swiftly moving turntable for some uncommonly graceful scene changes. These are covered by Peter Nigrini's video montages of cracked-oil effects, the war in Vietnam, feminist marches, Jimmy Carter speaking to the American public, Ronald and Nancy Reagan celebrating Christmas at the White House, and much more. Japhy Weideman's lighting deftly reshapes the space for each scene. Jill BC Du Boff's sound design consists of a playlist of the hits of the '60s, '70s, and '80s, most notably "The Shoop Shoop Song." Jessica Pabst's costumes constitute of a catalog of styles over three decades, matched by Leah J. Loukas' hair and wig designs.

Perhaps it is too soon to be once again perusing Wasserstein's notes from a revolution. Perhaps in another ten years or so her arguments will come into sharper focus. At this distance, however, The Heidi Chronicles, for all the accuracy of its observations, comes across as a charming comedy sitting uneasily on a base of unexpressed anger, a tension that the playwright never really resolved in her later works. Wasserstein wasn't the only prominent female playwright of her day -- Marsha Norman, Caryl Churchill, and Paula Vogel immediately come to mind -- but among them, she led the way with her commentary on the shifting landscape between men and women. One wonders what she would make of today's theatrical landscape, inhabited by the likes of Annie Baker, Sarah Ruhl, Clare Barron, Heidi Schreck, Kate Benson, Sarah Treem, Bathsheba Doran, Melissa James Gibson, Bess Wohl, Amy Herzog, Laura Eason, and so many more. She can rightly claim them as part of her legacy; if The Heidi Chronicles sometimes disappoints, the example Wasserstein set still shines brightly. -- David Barbour