The Heidi Chronicles

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 18^th and 19^th-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.

You Can't Take It With You

photo: Joan Marcus

The new Broadway revival of Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s You Can’t Take It With You is spectacularly bad. This, perhaps, shouldn’t be surprising. New York theatre no longer specializes in top-drawer revivals of the classic comedies of the twenties, thirties, and forties. Once in an ever-growing while, you’ll get a production like Doug Hughes’ The Royal Family, done for Manhattan Theatre Club in 2009, where a talented cast creates the kind of magic that makes you feel like the golden age never ended. More often, though, you end up with subpar stagings that might even make you question the integrity of the original work: the Kim Cattrall Private Lives; the Victor Garber Present Laughter; Roundabout’s ghastly Old Acquaintance. There are even more such productions of which I don’t care to be reminded.
 

This new take on the Pulitzer-winning classic, staged by Scott Ellis in a Roundabout co-production, seemed so promising. On paper, the cast is divine. The set takes your breath away as soon as the house lights dim. The incidental music by three-time Tony winner Jason Robert Brown had my toes tapping. Yet as soon as the gums started flapping, I knew something was terribly wrong.