The Boomers Grow Up

The Heidi Chronicles at the Music Box Theatre 

Elisabeth Moss (far right) in The Heidi Chronicles.

            As deeply felt and occasionally sharply funny as it is sweepingly dated and dull, the first Broadway revival of a Wendy Wasserstein play, the Pam McKinnon-directed The Heidi Chronicles, stars, in a moment of brilliant casting, the phenomenally talented Elisabeth Moss.  Ms. Moss, best known for playing the increasingly self-sufficient woman of the sixties Peggy Olsen on the AMC series Mad Men, plays a very similar character here—a reserved, professional outsider, roused to anger only infrequently and then with very good reason.  Her role this time is the ambitious art historian Heidi Holland, whose life is tracked from a school dance in Chicago in 1965 to an empty loft in Manhattan in 1989.  Heidi’s story is clearly and unapologetically a first-wave feminist allegory, tracing the conformity of the women in Heidi’s life to a system they profess to love and hate, at different periods, with equal alacrity, and the passive oppression of men who seem to be extremely amused by the whole affair. 

            One would think, in the aftermath of two consecutive State of the Union addresses that have placed equal pay for equal work near the top of the list of American priorities to be addressed in the coming year, that this would all feel timely, but Ms. Wasserstein—an only sporadically inspired playwright, despite the fervor that has surrounded her legacy—is strictly a feminist of the old school, and her rhetoric belongs more accurately to the seventies than to the eighties, and definitely not to the now half-over ‘10s. 

            Ms. Moss’s greatest moment of the production, a speech delivered to a gathering of feminist activists at the Plaza Hotel in 1986, is performed with the professionalism of an actress many years older than Ms. Moss herself (she’s 32, playing 17-41).  Her lip quivers, her voice trembles, and she struggles to maintain decorum in an altogether convincing manner, captivating the audience.  The problem is that Heidi’s speech—which discusses the apparently vapid women in an exercise class with whom Heidi, and presumably Wasserstein, fail to identify—is filled with the gross generalizations and elitist pretention that went along with the fiery rhetoric of the first wave, and comes off like she’s talking down to any woman who dares fail to fit the exact mold of a feminist of the era.  As an activist Heidi meets in Ann Arbor in 1970 (played by Tracee Chimo) puts it—“You either shave your legs or you don’t.”  (Ms. Chimo, incidentally, plays several characters in the play, and this is the only one she fails to pull off with phenomenal comic aplomb.)  The problem with The Heidi Chronicles is that it fails to acknowledge that one can be a feminist no matter what one's standards of personal hygiene, which is what makes the play’s sensibility seem so out of place in today’s landscape.

            So the slack is left to the actors to pick up, and pick it up they—mostly—do.  Ms. Moss, naturally, is as stellar as ever, though it may be a struggle to see her Heidi as anything other than a slightly more neurotic Peggy Olsen.  (At one point someone asks Heidi why she’s clutching her handbag, and she responds, incredulously, “I have valuables!”  Somewhere Don Draper just shook his head condescendingly.)  Rounding out the leading triangle are Jason Biggs as Heidi’s on-and-off lover, Scoop Rosenbaum, and Bryce Pinkham (late of A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder) as her gay best friend (apparently a requisite for feminists in media), Peter Patrone.  Mr. Biggs is game and a good deliverer of Wassersteinian put-downs, but he is noticeably wooden onstage, never changing his posture from mood to mood, and it doesn’t help that his costumes (designed by the apparently short on time Jessica Pabst) are all two sizes too big, a touch which makes no point at all. 

            But Mr. Pinkham, in his role as a sardonic but caring stalwart friend to Heidi, steals the show.  His dexterity as an actor probably exceeds Ms. Moss’s.  He is alternately funny and tragic but always buoyant and brilliant on the stage, and his journey is the most rewarding in the play.  Heidi’s interesting in a sidelong way, sure.  But she’s quiet and mostly non-participatory in history.  In this era of rapidly changing gay rights, maybe what we really need is a Peter Chronicles, which could perhaps pull off the trick, as Wasserstein’s script never quite can, of lifting off without ever seeming anachronistic.