'Heidi Chronicles' still fresh, funny
NEW YORK -- Late in Act One of The Heidi Chronicles, the heroine gets a sobering tip from the ambitious narcissist she has been sleeping with, on and off, for nearly 10 years. Hers will be "a generation of disappointed women," he tells her. "Interesting, exemplary, even sexy, but basically unhappy. The ones who open doors usually are."
Heidi Holland is, you see, a Baby Boomer and an art historian whose yearning for sexual equality and social progress looms large in both her lectures and her personal life. Wendy Wasserstein's Pulitzer Prize-winning play follows her over more than two decades, ending in 1989, the year the work originally premiered.
Twenty-six years later, in director Pam MacKinnon's sensitive, impassioned new production (***1/2 out of four stars), Heidi's struggles can still seem dishearteningly familiar.
In this first Broadway revival -- which opened Thursday at the Music Box Theatre -- Heidi is played by Elisabeth Moss, best known as Peggy Olson on AMC's Mad Men, a woman battling sexism just before the cultural revolution that marks Heidi's coming of age. Moss brings the same empathy and accessibility to her new role, along with an endearing goofiness and a slight neurotic edge that suits the character.
The excellent company MacKinnon has assembled reminds us that Wasserstein's dialogue can be as funny as it is unsettling. Jason Biggs, of Orange Is the New Black and American Pie fame, mines the arrogance of Scoop Rosenbaum, Heidi's aforementioned flame and foil, with delicious wit.
As Heidi's more reliable confidante, the deeply compassionate but sometimes caustic Peter Patrone, rising stage star Bryce Pinkham delivers the show's breakout performance. We meet Peter as a precocious, awkward schoolboy who approaches the teenage Heidi at a dance and watch him into evolve to a young man bravely confronting his sexual identity, and then as a celebrated pediatrician grappling with the horrors of the AIDS crisis in the '80s. In the process, Pinkham makes us laugh, breaks our hearts and lifts our spirits with his character's courage and righteous indignation.
Seeing Heidi in 2015, it's easy to draw parallels between our time and the decade that brought us both HIV panic and go-go capitalism. As Heidi and her posse leave the idealism of the '60s and the soul-searching (and navel-gazing) of the '70s behind for the '80s in Act Two, even John Lee Beatty's set design and Jessica Pabst's costumes seem colder, coarser, more garish.
In one hilarious scene, Heidi, Scoop and Peter tape a segment for a vapid TV chat show. A producer lists their subjects, using reductive soundbites and advising them, "Our audiences like a little controversy with their coffee." Scoop, now a wildly successful magazine editor, then cites his readers' defining virtues, among them wealth and power. Sound anything like our corporate and media culture today?
Yet in the end, neither Wasserstein nor Heidi emerge as embittered by such trends, or by their experiences. Heidi remains, as ever, as appealing for its generosity of spirit as it is for its pluck.
(Myla Lerner, wife of USA TODAY publisher Larry Kramer, is a producer of the show.)