The Heidi Chronicles, City Theatre, March 26 - April 19

Wendy Wasserstein, playwright of The Heidi Chronicles, died in 2005, cut down in full artistic activity by lymphoma. Her play Third, which premiered that year, was performed in Austin last September by the Paradox Players. The City Theatre has just opened The Heidi Chronicles for a four-week run, featuring a talented young cast, clever staging and some still unanswered big questions.

One of five children of a wealthy Jewish family in Brooklyn, Wasserstein graduated from Mount Holyoke, then obtained master's degrees from City College of New York in 1971 and from the Yale School of Drama in 1976. Her graduate thesis project at Yale was produced off-Broadway in 1977, featuring Glenn Close, and then on PBS with Meryl Streep. Wasserstein wrote three more plays and then in 1989 The Heidi Chronicles won the Drama Desk award, the New York Critics' award for best new play, a Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

The juries for those awards must have recognized this play for its comic, yet earnest take on the emotional plight of highly educated American women. Female thirty-somethings faced contradictions and were assailed by cognitive dissonance when choosing between aspirations for careers and the allure of the safe, mostly suburban world of motherhood. If intelligent women were -- or should be -- the equals of men, why did so many of them decline to compete? And how could capable, successful female professionals establish the comfort, intimacy and family ties that seemed to accrue naturally to mothers and housewives in their warm and fuzzy little worlds?

In her portrayal of Heidi Holland from high school through her young middle age as a respected university professor, Wasserstein deliberately does not answer that question.

Read More . . . .

Upcoming: The Heidi Chronicles, City Theatre, March 26 - April 19

UPDATE: ALT review of The Heidi Chronicles, March 30

From the City Theatre:

The Heidi Chronicles
March 26 - April 19

THE CHRONICLES OF AN ERA: the hit play that speaks for feminism, freedom, friendship, and a generation of women. Winner of almost every national theatre award including the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Written by Wendy Wasserstein, an eloquent voice for a generation of American women. The hit play charts one feminist’s path from the tumultuous‘60s through the isolated ‘80s, but her journey is timeless.


THE HEIDI CHRONICLES
Cast List

Heidi: Rachel McGinnis
Susan: Christa Haxthausen
Peter: Gabe Smith
Scoop: Charles P. Stites
Ensemble: Katie Christman,
Samantha Brewer
Stacey Glazer
Martina Ohlhauser
Bridget Farias
Chris, Mark, Easter Bunny,
Waiter, Ray: Sesar Sandoval

About the Play:

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award,and many other nationally recognized awards.

A significant and celebrated play, which was first presented by Off-Broadway's Playwrights Horizons and went on to become a long-run Broadway success.

"Funny, touching, and written with rare grace and sensitivity, the play is a moving examination of the progress of a generation. Not many plays manage Heidi's feat of inducing almost continuous laughter while forcing the audience to examine its preconceptions…It's the play of the season…" —Variety.

Comprised of a series of interrelated scenes, the play traces the coming of age of Heidi Holland, a successful art historian, as she tries to find her bearings in a rapidly changing world. Gradually distancing herself from her friends, she watches them move from the idealism and political radicalism of their college years through militant feminism and, eventually, back to the materialism that they had sought to reject in the first place.

Heidi's own path to maturity involves an affair with the glib, arrogant Scoop Rosenbaum, a womanizing lawyer/publisher who eventually marries for money and position; a deeper but even more troubling relationship with a charming, witty young pediatrician, Peter Patrone, who turns out to be gay; and increasingly disturbing contacts with the other women, now much changed, who were a part of her childhood and college years.

Eventually Heidi comes to accept the fact that liberation can be achieved only if one is true to oneself, with goals that come out of need rather than circumstance. As the play ends she is still "alone," but having adopted an orphaned baby, it is clear that she has begun to find a sense of fulfillment and continuity that may well continue to elude the others of her anxious, self-centered generation.