THE HEIDI CHRONICLES
When Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles opened off-Broadway almost three years ago, it triggered an avalanche of articles and reviews, most of them concerned with how successfully Wasserstein had critiqued the baby boom in general and the women’s movement in particular. Inevitably such articles revealed much more about the writer and the periodical in which the piece appeared than about the play. Walter Shapiro, for example, writing for Time magazine (a publication always eager to discredit the projects of radical youth) dubbed the play an “elegy for [Wasserstein’s] lost generation” and crowned the playwright a “chronicler of frayed feminism.” Moira Hodgson, writing for the Nation, complained that Wasserstein’s satire was “harmless,” “perfect for Broadway since there is nothing in it to offend deeply or shake up the house.”
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So certain were these writers that Wasserstein meant her work to “ask hard questions about her generation” that they missed the play. True, those looking for evidence that things have not turned out as planned for this generation will find it in The Heidi Chronicles–as they will find it in almost any work of art or newspaper article that honestly reflects the anxieties and ambivalence of our age. Things never turn out as planned for any generation. But I think it cheapens the power of Wasserstein’s work, as revealed in Sheldon Patinkin’s intelligent, sensitive production currently playing at the National Jewish Theater, to consider The Heidi Chronicles merely an essay in play form, discussing those favorite topics of life-style journalists: Whither feminism? And what’s hot, what’s not among the baby-boom generation.
I don’t believe this is a flaw, however–either in Wasserstein’s script or in St. John’s performance. In fact it’s one of the qualities that make Heidi endearing. Those who claim that the play has no dramatic center, because Heidi is too quiet and reflective, labor under the misconception that protagonists must make big, active, obvious choices. These critics don’t know how to listen to Heidi. Nor do they understand that there are lots of people out there, of both sexes, who deal with life in the same removed, self-ironic manner. Not all of us can be like Peter (ably played by Si Osborne), voted the “leading pediatrician in New York under 40,” or like chronic overachiever and world-class schmuck Scoop (played with superb comic timing by Jeff Ginsberg).
In a program note Sobol says he’s developed his technique as a monologuist by collecting stories and songs in Appalachia, Ireland, and New Orleans. But where he learned his craft matters less than his onstage charisma and gifts as a storyteller. He has a clever way of turning the everyday details of his early adolescence–the lists of secret agents he admired (James Bond, Napoleon Solo, Emma Peel), the fact that he and his friends anxiously believed puberty to be a conspiracy not unlike the one in Invasion of the Body Snatchers–into humorous, evocative tales.
