The Heidi Chronicles
By Wendy Wasserstein
Directed by Tazewell Thompson
Arena Stage, through May 13
The Heidi Chronicles is a play cool to the touch. For all its well-meaning depictions of well-meaning people, the Pulitzer- and Tony-winning 1988 drama about a single woman finding her balance through several decades of societal change is hard to emotionally connect with. Maybe that’s why the cleverly conceived and well-acted production currently at Arena could still leave me strangely unmoved.
Part of the problem is that Heidi Holland, an art historian, remains something of a mystery to us. We know what she says, though even that a bit indirectly: that the two men she’s most loved in life have left her adrift, one, the pediatrician Peter Patrone, because he’s gay, and the other, the magazine magnate Scoop Rosenbaum, because he wanted a wife who would subjugate her interests and ambitions to his.
But drama is often the successful dodge of the old literary directive to show, don’t tell, since stage relies so often on tell. And Chronicles suffers for that, because Heidi is so reserved. In a few fairly powerful monologues, she tells of her insecurity, her sense of being stranded not just by the men in her life, but by the women who have abandoned her and her causes for families or careers or (touched on more lightly) a narrow, politically unforgiving feminism or lesbianism.
But those confessions are brief and strained and stifled. Most of the time she sighs and stares and glares. As the out and outspoken lesbian character, Fran, puts it during a Ms.-era women’s rap session, Heidi “has a ways to go, but she’s one smart repressed woman.” Well, exactly. Ellen Karas, under the direction of Tazewell Thompson, plays her with as much flinty vulnerability as I can imagine, but it’s hard to feel one’s way into the outlook of a character radiating distrust, even if she is also ostensibly in love, angry, disappointed, and whatnot, because she can’t show it, and is only barely and partially able to tell it.Unhelpful, too, is the stagecraft required by the play’s structure. After an opening art-history lecture, most of the story is told in a series of episodic flashbacks from the ’60s on through the mid-’80s, requiring mostly middle-age actors to don a series of wigs, sideburns, and youthful attitudes that, especially in this theater in the round setting, somewhat defy our sense and senses. Again, costumer Merrily Murray-Walsh’s work is superb (dig the Mondrian dress at the Neat and Clean for Eugene party, and April’s skirt suit on her ’80s TV show), as is Jill Kaplan’s wig and makeup design. But the illusion requires a distance and trickery to work its best magic, and the Fichlander Theatre’s not the optimal place for it. Call that a quibble, but combine it with the inherent chilliness of the main characterization, and it’s more than a little problematic.
Then there’s simply the datedness of the script. Its thirtysomething concerns ring a little weirdly now that the fifty- and sixtysomethings are more worried about retirement than about career. A woman’s navigating work/family choices is still all too germane, but—dare I say it?—the fact that those dilemmas are still so relevant suggests that they might be at least somewhat timeless and universal and perhaps not fully resolvable. Heidi seeks a future panacea, indeed willfully martyrs herself to it, whereas a dynamic series of never completely satisfactory tradeoffs has come to seem more likely.
The same could be said of a single, straight woman’s awkwardness around a beloved male friend’s homosexuality. That is, the play’s political setup is that Heidi is in the vanguard generation making drastic personal sacrifices so that future generations of women will have it easier. Well guess what: The Graces of the Will and Grace generation haven’t found that to be true. Yes, the boomers were and are a vanguard generation, but evidence suggests work-family choices and sexual politics in the personal realm are still just as harrowing, if in a somewhat different key, and always will be.
Only the passage of time highlights those truths, but that additional light isn’t flattering. Heidi is admirable, of course, as a career woman advancing the viewpoint of historically neglected and unappreciated women artists. And her sharp, witty lectures on works like Lilly Martin Spencer’s “We Both Must Fade” constitute some of the most skillful writing in the show. But Heidi’s self-centeredness, particularly around Peter during the ’80s early brunt of the gay AIDS epidemic, is unappealing, no less so for his pointing that out. Heidi seeks happiness. She must shield herself from obsolete expectations. Duly noted. But does she have to do it with such relative disregard for the many other kinds of unhappiness around her?
“Bored, depressed, anxious—these are the qualities I look for in a woman,” Peter tells her jokingly around the “ladies’ choice” song of the high school dance at which they meet. And yet the joke’s not entirely funny, because it’s ultimately not what he’s looking for, or if it is then it’s at the expense of looking for deeper soul-mate qualities in women at all. And yet his description fits Heidi Holland a little too well.But that’s the character! you say. She’s not uninteresting. There are many women like her.
True. I dwell on the point only to explain, guiltily, the chills that didn’t run down my spine during the moments when I think they were supposed to.
It doesn’t help that, beyond the art lectures, the situations and characters are drawn pretty broadly. Doing the Hully Gully at the high-school dance, the McCarthy-era pickup lines and dry-look cocksureness, the ’70s women’s rap sessions, the imbecilic ’80s TV morning show, and so on are all skillfully mapped scenes, but they too often resemble skits based, with the help of period hit pop songs, on dubious decade-divided generalities and stereotypes. Moreover, in these quasi-skits Heidi is mostly reactive. There are any number of clever one-liners and rejoinders. But the whole lacks nuance; it’s a well-worn, effective, but kind of dry narrative shorthand. And lack of nuance in a character study is unfortunate.
And yet … this is a well-paced, handsome production with quite uniformly excellent performances. Karas projects a brittle strength that evolves and matures into a melancholy self-knowledge. “I’ve been sad for a long time,” she says late in the play. “I don’t want to be sad anymore.” Her disillusionment is palpable as she addresses fellow alums of Miss Crain’s School in Chicago on the topic, “Women: Where Are We Going?” As someone who sees that destination always disappearing over the horizon, she memorably conveys harsh truths.
Marty Lodge fills out perfectly—without becoming the caricature that he could—the role of Scoop, the “charismatic creep” who sweeps Heidi off her feet in his ’60s days as editor of the upstart Liberated Earth News, only to keep her debilitatingly off balance as he develops into the Gordon Gekko-dressed founder of the slick periodical Boomer, keeping the world safe from pastels.
Wynn Harmon brings a wonderful combination of tenderness, playfulness, and quiet ambition to the role of Peter. He reflects much of what’s best in Heidi, and what’s best about Wasserstein’s writing. For him, she lets it flow and takes some chances that pay off intellectually and emotionally.
Catherine Weidner, as Heidi’s longtime friend Susan, is an enjoyable chameleon, particularly as she evolves from Montana commune member to L.A. producer. At Susan’s LaLaLand lunch with Heidi, Susan practically bites the head off their young waiter as a side dish to her (as she snarls) “swordfish—dry, no butter at all.”
Susan Bennett also brings bite to her various incarnations, including Fran the combat-dressed rap-session lesbian; April, the flighty, polished New York TV talk show host; and a tipsy pregnant pal at a baby shower.
In the rap session, particularly, Emerie Snyder has a sweet grace as a girl whom life’s pinned to the ropes. And Hope Lambert, as Scoop’s wife, manages to project considerable back story, grit, and intelligence into that somewhat thankless role.
Donald Eastman’s crisp set features a versatile cube suspended above center stage that becomes a multi-screen for film clips, stills, and other era representations. But, with Robert Wierzel's lighting, it also serves as a richly colored abstract planet both illuminating and shading Heidi’s bittersweet experiences. Fabian Obispo provides perky, percussive incidental music and richly textured sound design.
One of the tunes we hear is Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me,” a recurring motif that signals what’s right and what’s wrong with this play. Wasserstein boldly explores what happens when the prominent people in our lives send or are sent by us, and to those left behind. But she casts that in overly political terms, making even the work’s once-controversial ending, about Heidi’s decision whether or not to start a family of her own, a polemic, based on her forecast of what the world might hold for a child. Whether or not she sends another child into the world, pivoting the decision on such abstractions seems unhealthy. And perhaps it encapsulates the reasons why she’s hard to fully bond with—for other characters, and for the audience as well.
-A.C.K.
Photos, courtesy of Arena Stage: Karas with Harmon, Karas with Lodge, and Heidi and friends rallying in Chicago
