There’s a lot of talk about form and content in Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles, now revived on Broadway. Characters discuss it in regards to Josef Albers’s Homage to the Square, Sam Cooke’s You Send Me, even a plate of cookies.
“A+ pecan. B- sandy,” says Heidi Holland (Elisabeth Moss of Mad Men).
“Better,” her former Scoop Rosenbaum (Jason Biggs) corrects her. “ B+ sandy.”
Form and content coincide uneasily in this 1988 play, which took home the Tony and the Pulitzer. It follows art historian Heidi from the 1960s through the 1980s as she navigates her career, relationships, and the changing role of women in society. Sometimes angry, sometimes mournful, it is most of all a highly commercial piece of writing and the demands of Broadway’s manners and modes have a way of flattening out and neatening up the play’s narratives and conflicts. Ultimately it creates a false dichotomy that puts professional success on one side and love and marriage on the other.
Even in 1988 that equation must have seemed simplistic and it certainly feels that way now, which is not to say that many of Heidi’s observations and complaints don’t resonate. They do. But every time the play seems to be approaching nuance or real complexity, there’s a song, a joke, a great big bow on a scene to tie it up. The emotions are genuinely messy — or they could be — but the play is always cleaning up after itself. Can’t a woman make a mess? And leave it?
Well, yes and no. If you want more plays by women and more plays about women (Broadway is terrible about the former, only somewhat better about the latter), you need to show that those plays can succeed. If you want it to run for a couple of years, which it did, you’d better put in a couple of jokes.
I imagine the play must have once felt pretty universal, but now, despite some nice performances and Pam MacKinnon’s smooth, unsentimental direction, it feels more minor than that. Part of the problem is that while a lot of the play is about Heidi questioning and coming to terms with the choices she’s made, we rarely see her making them, mostly she’s reacting to the choices of others. And because of those formal restrictions, the choices she has feel oddly truncated and limited.
Moss, a terrific actress, is very able to show Heidi’s sarcastic exterior and also the vulnerability underneath, but perhaps there’s something missing in the middle that would make the character feel most fully alive. Bryce Pinkham is charming as Heidi’s close friend, and Ali Ahn in her Broadway debut, as Heidi’s other close friend, nicely morphs from teeny bopper to crusading lawyer to feminist radical to corporate go-getter. Tracee Chimo is fierce in a quartet of roles. Jason Biggs doesn’t really sell Scoop as the sort of man an accomplished woman might keep screwing up her life for — he’s swaggering, sure, but without that fiercely erotic undertow — though he’s far more sure and able stage actor than all those American Pie films would suggest.
The play’s politics seem retrograde, but maybe there’s some comfort in that. In the final scene, Heidi offers some hopes for her adopted daughter, that if she ever meets a man like Scoop, “he’ll never tell her it’s either/or baby. And she’ll never think she’s worthless unless he lets her have it all. And maybe, just maybe, things will be a little better.” And from the vantage of 2015, things do seem better. If only a little. Where’s the play about that?
