Heidi Chronicles (Dramatization) [Audio Download]

Heidi Holland, with an Ivy League education and a Fulbright in England under her belt, is a lecturer in art history, an expert on female artists virtually unknown in their lifetimes, though their work is as good as that of the male painters who dominated their ages. Using the art history "hook" into the question of women and their roles--as they see their roles, as men see women's roles, and as women search for happiness within these roles--Wendy Wasserstein has written a thoughtful and very funny drama about the Baby Boom generation and the price its women have paid as they have searched for fulfillment.

Exploring Heidi Holland's life from the late 1960s to the 1990s, Wasserstein takes us from Heidi's high school and college days, as she grows in her thinking and view of her role in life, to her experiences with women's lib focus groups, the Eugene McCarthy campaign, the rise of AIDS, the gay movement, and ultimately Heidi's realization of what is important to her, not just professionally and philosophically, but personally and emotionally.

Wasserstein uses wit and a keen ear for dialogue to create quick, often humorous interchanges which advance the action and the feminist message without polemics. Heidi is, on the surface, a success by all external measurements, but she feels that she is missing something from her life. Professional success is not enough for her, a revelation that made this play somewhat controversial within the women's movement when it was first produced in 1988. Some feminists apparently believed Heidi's desire for emotional fulfillment through love to be a sellout to a male dominated culture.

Wasserstein emphasizes that women should be able to pursue both professional success and a personal life, however, and the rounded character of Heidi remains a nice contrast to the more strident and sometimes hostile female characters with whom she interacts on stage. Throughout the action, the play's high humor and absurdity are nicely balanced with scenes of sentiment and sorrowful revelation, and Wasserstein maintains her light touch without trivializing the issues. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1989, the play offers insights into significant social issues, gracefully presented so that they do not alienate the audience. Mary Whipple

The late Wendy Wasserstein wrote this amusing play. Reading it one is reminded of Eugene McCarthy's campaign for President and women's groups consciousness-raising sessions. The play consists of a number of scenes, vignettes, taking place at one or two year intervals, as the same baby-boomer characters meet life challenges. The humor is wonderful and the subject matter is memory-charged.

Heidi Holland, an easterner from Chicago, (get the joke?), is attending graduate school at Yale. She has the sometimes interest of a man she met in the McCarthy campaign. The other women in the group feel she is insufficiently liberated, but that she has the potential to be, in the jargon of our time, politically correct. In another instance Heidi and Peter Patrone, her fiancee, a pediatrician, are attending the marriage of Scoop, a former beau of Heidi, and Lisa Friedlander, an illustrator. Scoop tells Heidi that Lisa is not an A plus like Heidi but that Lisa is the best he can do. Heidi's gift, a crock pot, is not to Scoop's liking.

In Act II Heidi is lecturing on Lilla Cabot Perry, an American Impressionist painter. Lisa, very pregnant, is having a baby shower. Heidi arrives late. She has been living in England. The friends speak of a family whose child did not get into the kindergarten at the Ethical Culture Society and so the whole family is in therapy. In 1982 Heidi and friends appear on TV. The topics presented include women in the arts and the Sixties. Scoop Rosenbaum is editor of the BOOMER magazine. (The name Scoop, of course, has to do with the fact that he claims he is a journalist.) Scoop remarks portentiously that hearing his own children pulls him out of any "me generation" residue. Susan and Heidi meet for lunch. It seems that Peter and Scoop monopolized the TV program and we learn that Peter and Heidi didn't marry. In the lunch scene Susan speaks of a boy friend and Heidi does too. Heidi is doing a small show of Lilla Cabot Perry's work. Susan tells her that in L.A. everyone creates his own story, (title, THE HEIDI CHRONICLES).

Two years later Heidi is speaking to the Miss Crain's Association as an alumna. Heidi tells of her trip to the gym and how she is embarassed in front of and envious of every woman present. She allows that she hasn't been happy for some time. The following year Heidi accepts a position to teach at Carleton College. Before setting out to the Midwest Heidi sees Peter at his hospital. It seems that the AIDS crisis, having great impact among his friends and acquaintances, has made it seem to him that sadness is a luxury.

My review may have made this play seem hopelessly self-referential, but it is not. Wasserstein was too accomplished a playwright to fall into such a trap.

This play came in fair condition and was exactly what I needed at the time. I even got a great price for it. Yea!