Review

Reviewed Work(s): The Heidi Chronicles by Wendy Wasserstein and Tazewell Thompson
Review by: Jill Dolan
Source: Theatre Journal, Vol. 59, No. 4, Performance and Cognition (Dec., 2007), pp. 667-
669
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25070127
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black-and-white family photos reproduced in the
text. But as with the autobiographical People Who
Led To My Plays, whose chronology is propelled by
photographs and lines of text that never mesh into
full explanation, Mom How Did You Meet the Beatles?
narrates and interrupts its narration, losing us and
AK in its glowing circumlocutions. In the pauses,
however, a drama shouts to be heard.
That drama's story is easily summarized. Newly
separated from her husband, Adrienne Kennedy
meets the producer from Circle-in-the-Square who
wants to commission a play. Asked what she pro
poses, AK replies that she'd "like to make a play of
John Lennon's nonsense writings. I thought that re
ally sounded great... maybe go to London and meet
the Beatles or something (laughing)." The producer
happens to know Lennon's publisher and soon our
playwright is off to London with her younger son,
swept into the gossipy milieu of London theatre's
glitterati. In a twinkling, she and Adam are installed
in a Primrose Hill flat and, one contact leading to
another, she meets Victor Spinetti, Kenneth Tynan,
and?miracle of miracles!?Paul McCartney and
John Lennon (not to mention Ringo and George),
and finally Laurence Olivier who clearly wants to
produce a Lennon work at the National Theatre,
which he then headed. All profess to be excited by
AK's project, but at the first rehearsal she does not
recognize her text. Spinetti informs her that, hav
ing already made changes, he will be co-writing the
play while Olivier, dazzling her with high-kilowatt
star power, silently urges submission. One roots for
AK as she informs Lennon of the betrayal, gamely
approaches lawyers, and refuses to attend opening
night (the play soon closes). One senses in Olivier's
gaze not only calculation, but also genuine baffle
ment at this determined yet star-struck American
writer whose only words at a pre-show dinner are
"I can't believe you're Laurence Olivier."
The play neither blames nor fully reveals; the
drama curdles in the ellipses that are everywhere
in the text. A racial narrative flickers in and out of
view ("You know there was this big racial thing in
London. And there weren't many American Blacks
. . ."), but AK quickly lets us know that the sweet
fruit of red carpets and celebrity recognition are
as important to her as the poison pit that may lie
within. London in the late 1960s excited, thrilled,
disappointed her?in what measure the audience
is left to decide. Attempts have been made to stage
Kennedy's autobiographical collage, People Who Led
To My PlaysMn Mom How Did You Meet the Beatles?
Kennedy and Kennedy have created a beautiful
stage-worthy memory play, a play both riveting and
intimate, with a story that truly lingers.
ELIN DIAMOND
Rutgers University
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PERFORMANCE REVIEW / 667
THE HEIDI CHRONICLES. By Wendy Wasser
stein. Directed by Tazewell Thompson. Arena
Stage, Fichandler Theatre, Washington, DC.
2 May 2007.
When The Heidi Chronicles opened on Broadway in
1989, critics heralded it as the arrival of feminism in
mainstream theatre. Playwright Wendy Wasserstein
captured the Tony and Pulitzer prizes and the New
York Drama Critics Award for the play, which traces
art professor Heidi Holland's peripatetic wander
ings through American history from the early 1960s
to the late 1980s. In scenes that browse historical
moments like snapshots from a family photo album,
Wasserstein's heroine first rejects feminism ("I'm a
humanist," she insists at her first consciousness
raising group session), then somehow finds herself
"stranded" with her self-proclaimed activism, alone
as an ambitious, socially aware woman who thought
"we were all in this together."
Changes in history propel Heidi's fortune, as
her friends' choices throw her own into high re
lief. Susan, who first rolls up her skirt to attract a
man at a high school dance, evolves into a radical
lesbian feminist living on a collective in Montana.
She morphs next into a lawyer-MBA pitching Hol
lywood television pilots that crassly capitalize on
the advancements feminism has provided for white
middle-class women.
Heidi's first love, Scoop Rosenbaum, climbs from
editing the bohemian Whole Earth News to the zeit
geist-tracking Boomer magazine and, at the show's
finale, contemplates a run for high public office.
Heidi's male "BFF," the handsome, gay Peter Pa
trone, becomes a pediatrician treating AIDS babies.
He ultimately chastises Heidi for her individualist
self-involvement.
Although history courses forward, Heidi finds her
role models in the earlier-era portrait paintings by
women she teaches. Her dissatisfaction with femi
nism finally enunciated, Heidi adopts a baby (whom
she names Judy, for feminist artist Judy Chicago),
hoping life will be brighter for her daughter. With
the curtain's fall, Wasserstein defers women's real
achievements to the future, when another genera
tion will reap the rewards of the discontent second
wave feminism sowed.
Given the changes witnessed in the almost twenty
years since the play premiered, and given Wasser
stein's untimely death in 2006, revisiting The Heidi
Chronicles seems a logical choice. But as directed by
Tazewell Thompson for the Arena Stage, although
the play offers new potential for commenting on the
status of a certain strata of American women, the
production doesn't escape the text's episodic pitfalls
or the excesses of its breezy satire.
668 / Theatre Journal

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(1-r) Hope Lambert, Ellen Karas (as Heidi Holland), Emerie Snyder and Susan Bennett protest the
lack of women artists at the Art Institute of Chicago in The Heidi Chronicles. Photo: Scott Suchman.

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The original production layered its stage pictures
with artifacts of the history it cycled through. The
Arena production relegates history to program
notes. Photos of Gloria Steinern and other feminist
visionaries are projected on a large white cube hang
ing above the rectangular in-the-round stage dur
ing the consciousness-raising scene in the first act.
After that superficial nod to context, the prominent
cube is used only to suggest d?cor: the chandeliers
at the Pierre Hotel where Scoop marries the forc
ibly sunny Southerner Lisa on whom he promptly
cheats; the entrance to the Art Institute of Chicago,
where Heidi demonstrates against the marginaliza
tion of women's work; an empty white canvas for
the large New York loft Heidi purchases in which
to raise her daughter; and, of course, the art-history
slides Heidi projects in the lectures that begin both
acts. History recedes.
Arena's stage was empty throughout the produc
tion, perhaps because of the challenge of placing
furniture on a set in the round. Stage hands hauled
out various styles of chairs to mark each scene (for
example, plastic-molded community-center chairs
for the consciousness-raising group; red swivel
chairs for the television studio interview; and Queen
Anne-style chairs for the Pierre Hotel wedding).
These flimsy, uninteresting seats bore the burden
of historical representation. The production floated
between then and now, since even the costumes
failed to evoke each moment's sartorial idiosyncra
sies. The supporting women wore different cheap
looking wigs in each scene to represent the many
subsidiary characters they played.
Since they also worked with very few props, the
oddly miscast actors were left to rely on one another.
Heidi was played, as usual, by a nondescript white
woman (Ellen Karas, who did as well as expected
with Heidi's bloodless, enigmatic suffering). But
Scoop, who is typically played by a young, dark,
somewhat handsome Semitic-looking man, was cast
here as an older, awkward, gentile-looking Walter
Matthau clone (Marty Lodge). Lodge played Scoop
as a crusty curmudgeon, with little of the suave
Jewish playfulness that keeps the character from
becoming decidedly repulsive.
Wynn Harmon offered a braying, hyper-campy
version of Peter. He captured none of Peter's sad
ness or fatigue, none of his resentment over the
changes in his relationship with Heidi. The actor's
way of "playing gay" was forced and unlikely. He
spent most of the play taking his sexuality "as out
as possible," as he's asked to do by the preposter
ous host of "Hello New York."
In the right hands, these characters might tran
scend their inherent superficiality and become mov
ing representatives of the baby-boomer generation's
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PERFORMANCE REVIEW / 669
changing values. But the Arena cast lacked the depth
and verve demanded by Wasserstein's style. Without
an appreciation of the story's potential nuances, the
scenes rambled on, stale joke after joke.
Thompson's production misunderstood the stakes
underneath the comedy and failed to score Wasser
stein's important points about the values sacrificed
in the relentless progress from 1960s idealism to
1980s acquisitiveness. After all, although two de
cades have passed since she launched her comic
critique, the boomer generation's values are still
contemporary and relevant. But this production
marked time rather than engaging its passage, let
ting actors wander about the stage with no more
motivation than showing their faces to the sur
rounding audience. Thompson took no risks; the
actors' choices failed to register; and the experience
of revisiting an important if vexing contemporary
American drama felt hollow.
Although the production chose not to engage
the wistful though sometimes poignant pathos that
could shade Wasserstein's version of US feminism, I
was glad Arena presented The Heidi Chronicles. Was
serstein was the only contemporary woman who
saw her plays produced regularly on Broadway. I
hope more regional theatres choose to explore her
oeuvre, since Wasserstein's contribution to Ameri
can theatre deserves reconsideration in production
as well as in our scholarship.
JILL DOLAN
University of Texas at Austin
THE SEAFARER. Written and directed by
Conor McPherson. National Theatre, Cot
tesloe, London. 7 January 2007.
ROCK 'N' ROLL. By Tom Stoppard. Directed
by Trevor Nunn. Duke of York's Theatre,
London. 8 January 2007.
The scope of redemption's power, from the for
giveness within a fractured family to the libera
tion of an entire nation, heated up London stages
last January in fiery new plays by two of the best
dramatists currently writing in English. With The
Seafarer, Irish-born Conor McPherson harvested
from the Dublin suburbs at Christmas time an en
ergy as riveting and enchanting as the wild Diony
sian rhythms that pulsed through Rock 'n Roll, in
which Sir Tom Stoppard?at seventy years, twice
McPherson's age?cast his native Czechoslovakia
in the unlikely role of a cover band playing the
surprises of history.