Produced by special arrangement with Marc Madnick and Michael Cassel Group Surely, her charisma will seep through, but so will her hard-nosed assessment of the way we lived then.Music and Lyrics by Alan Zachary & Michael Weinerīased on the Paramount motion picture written by Timothy Harris and Herschel Weingrod 23, when “The Heidi Chronicles” begins performances at the Music Box, directed by Pam MacKinnon and starring Elisabeth Moss, who plays Peggy Olson on “Mad Men.” (A penny to hear Heidi and Peggy debate the seventies in Moss’s head.) It’s the first posthumous Broadway production of a Wasserstein play, and a good chance to revisit her not as a personality but as a playwright. How does Wasserstein’s oeuvre stand up, decades after the cultural moments she catalogued? We’ll have the opportunity to find out starting Feb. In one scene, Heidi describes herself as a “highly informed spectator,” which is what Wasserstein, despite her chumminess, truly was: an ambivalent woman on the sidelines, mentally taking notes. Along the way, there’s a hefty sprinkling of Zeitgeist signifiers: Eugene McCarthy, consciousness-raising, power lunches, AIDS. “The Heidi Chronicles” follows a Wendy-like heroine, an art historian, and her misadventures with men, from a high-school dance in 1965 to the yuppie excesses of the late eighties.
Drawing from her own life, she traced the hangups of her generation, from the broken promises of second-wave feminism (“Uncommon Women and Others,” her début play, from 1977) to middle-aged sibling rivalry (“The Sisters Rosensweig,” from 1992). She had an instinct for boulevard comedy, and her milieu-Ivy League-educated, Jewish baby boomers with ennui-was always decidedly unhip. Wasserstein’s writing is often as chatty and accessible as she was, which may be why it was sometimes dismissed as middlebrow. But both are richly evident in her plays, particularly “The Heidi Chronicles.” In 1989, she won the Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award for the feminist-minded play, which is being revived on Broadway this month.
As Julie Salamon depicts in her indispensable biography, “Wendy and the Lost Boys,” there was much melancholy lurking behind Wasserstein’s giggle, and much shrewdness, too. Her instant intimacy, even from a lectern, was deceptive when she died, in 2006, of complications from lymphoma, few people had even known she was sick.
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Bubbly, approachable, reflexively self-deprecating-she was the first to crack a joke about her weight or her neuroses-Wendy, as the theatre world knew her, was everyone’s schlubby best friend, the opposite of the prickly literary eminence. Throughout Wendy Wasserstein’s pioneering career, her work was sometimes overshadowed by her effusive persona.
Elisabeth Moss, Bryce Pinkham, and Jason Biggs star in Wendy Wasserstein’s 1988 play, “The Heidi Chronicles.” Illustration by Agata Nowicka
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