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| Tracee Chimo, Jason Biggs, Elisabeth Moss, and Bryce Pinkham. Photo: Joan Marcus |
Peggy Olson,
the barrier-breaking copy chief on AMC’s Mad Men, is surely kin to Heidi
Holland, second-wave feminist art historian and central figure of Wendy
Wasserstein’s Pulitzer-Prize winning 1989 dramedy The Heidi Chronicles. Thus it
seems only fitting that, for the first New York revival of Wasserstein’s
still-vibrant character study, Heidi should be played by Elisabeth Moss,
television’s Peggy. I’m sure this will have double-consciousness effect on many
in the audience.
The Heidi
Chronicles begins in 1989, at Columbia University, where Heidi is now a
professor. There’s a gradual erasure: in the middle of a lecture on neglected
women artists of the 18th and 19th-century, Heidi begins
to recede into her own past. We meet her at seventeen, in her hometown of
Chicago, at the dance where she meets her lifelong friend Peter Patrone (Bryce
Pinkham). We see her as a “Get Clean for Gene” kid in Manchester, New
Hampshire, where she meets another significant man: her once and future lover,
Scoop Rosenbaum (Jason Biggs). The seventies find Heidi at a
consciousness-raising women’s group at the University of Michigan; protesting
the lack of female representation at the University of Chicago; and coming to
terms with her fractured personal life. Along with Scoop (radical
journalist-cum-lifestyle magazine founder) and Peter (chief pediatrician at New
York hospital), Heidi hits her professional stride in the eighties, becoming
(or, perhaps more accurately, being thrust into the role of) an avatar of
yuppie-boomer status.
Given these
events, it’s perhaps understandable that some questioned whether this play
would pack the punch it did twenty-five years ago, when it was firmly
identifiable as a comment on current culture. Those fears of datedness, however,
were completely unfounded. The Heidi Chronicles is as fresh, alive, and
necessary as ever. Like the works of the female artists Heidi champions, this
is not merely a museum piece; it is a living testament to the life,
achievements, and struggles of a modern woman. And Pam MacKinnon’s smashing
production hits its stride early and fires on all cylinders.
