A Highly Informed Spectator

Tonight is opening night of The Heidi Chronicles! We couldn't be more excited and we hope you'll join us sometime in the upcoming weeks. In preparation for the show, Dramaturg Paul Doyle gives insight into some of the references in the play we didn't all know.

Heidi’s journey as observer and outsider is steeped in the political movements, buzz words, and culture of the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s. The names and concepts are touchstones are meant to anchor us in each scene through the years. In case you missed a few of the references, here’s a brief primer.

Weatherperson – At the party in 1968, Heidi uses this gender-neutral term to ask if Scoop is a member of the Weathermen (aka Weather Underground), a communist student movement, that became well know in the 1970s for a series of high-profile domestic bombings (described by former Weatherman Bill Ayers—remember that “scandal” during the 2008 presidential campaign?—as “symbolic acts of extreme vandalism”) in protest of the Vietnam War and meant to disrupt the government. The name comes from a lyric in Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”

Herbert Marcuse – a German-born political philosopher whose critiques of consumerism and capitalism (best-known works include Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man) strongly influenced both the student movements of the 1960 and the developing field of pop culture studies. Marcuse’s philosophy combined elements of Marxism, Freudian theory, and Hegelian dialecticism. To not be familiar with Marcuse would most definitely have raised eyebrows at a Gene McCarthy campaign party.

Consciousness-raising – Jill and Fran’s women’s rap group was part of the growing feminist movement of the late 60’s and early 1970’s. In discussing and analyzing events in their lives (“rapping”), these women-only gatherings aimed to make the participants aware of systematic oppression in their lives, and offer support in identifying it, analyzing it, and fighting back.

“Erlichperson” and “Haldeperson” – Peter is using gender-neutral terminology to refer to John Ehrlichman and Harry Haldeman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs and Chief of Staff (respectively) during the Nixon administration. By this point in history, both men had resigned from their posts in the fallout from the Watergate scandal. In a year, they would both be serving federal prison sentences.

Florine Stettheimer -- A lesser-known Modernist painter (1871 – 1944), known for painting fanciful representations of Broadway, Fifth avenue, and other New York scenes. She also designed the sets and costumes for Four Saints in Three Acts, a 1934 opera by Vigil Thompson with a libretto by Gertrude Stein.

Laura Nyro – female vocalist whose work blended gospel, avant-garde jazz, and pop music forms into a series of critically-acclaimed albums in the late sixties and early seventies. Pretty good stuff.

Judy Chicago – Feminist visual artist, active since the 1960s. By 1974, Chicago had already founded feminist art programs at CSU Fresno, Cal Arts, and the Los Angeles Women’s Building. In the late seventies, Chicago would create her most famous work, The Dinner Party, consisting of a triangular table with place settings for 39 famous women of myth and history.

Felix Frankfurter – An associate justice of the Supreme Court from 1939-1962, Frankfurter’s formative years were spent on New York’s Lower East Side, saving money for Harvard Law School and attending leftist lectures at the Cooper Union. Early in his career, his progressive views brought him to the defense of leftists and radicals (he wrote a scathing critique of the case against Sacco and Vanzetti), but his strong preference for judicial restraint (upholding a piece of legislation unless it is obviously unconstitutional) placed him in the conservative wing of the Supreme Court. He taught at Harvard Law before joining the court and had an annoying habit of lecturing his colleagues at length during meetings.

“Mass weeping with Yoko in Central Park” – John Lennon was shot and killed by stalker Mark Chapman on December 8, 1980 outside his home at the Dakota building in New York City. This mention of the memorial for Lennon places us on Sunday, December 14, 1980, when an enormous crowd gathered in Central Park for a memorial service.

Reaganomics – Hot topic starting in the early eighties, during Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign. In brief, Reagan’s policies sought to leave behind the economic malaise of the 1970s by reducing government spending, reducing taxes, and removing government regulation of industry.

“Death of the ERA” – The Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed constitutional change stating that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” Introduced in every session of Congress from 1923 to 1970, it was passed by Congress in 1972, but failed to be ratified by the state legislatures by the deadline of June 30, 1982. It was most recently reintroduced in the House of Representatives on July 21, 2009.

The Ethical Culture School – Scoop refers this famous New York private school at the McCarthy party where he meets Heidi, and again when he reveals that he’s late for his son’s fourth grade play (an adaptation of Gunter Grass’s violent allegory for post-World War II Germany The Wicked Cooks). The school is known for its progressive educational philosophy and emphasis on ethical instruction and community service.

Wendy Wasserstein Biography

With “The Heidi Chronicles” Wendy Wasserstein cemented her place as the first great playwright of an unspoken generation. Today, The Custom Made Theatre Blog takes a look at her life and work.

Wendy Wasserstein was born on October 18, 1950 in Brooklyn, New York, the youngest of five children in a struggling Jewish family. Her father, a textile manufacturer, patented velveteen and, with new found finances, the family moved to Manhattan when she was 12. There Wasserstein attended plays and while moved and inspired, was also distressed that she was not seeing smart, strong, witty women, like herself, represented onstage.

Wasserstein attended Mount Holyoke College and graduated in 1971. She proceeded to get an MFA in creative writing at City College, where she wrote her first produced play, “Any Woman Can't.” André Bishop, the artistic director of Playwright’s Horizons, produced “Any Woman Can’t” in 1973 and went on to produce almost all of Wasserstein’s plays.

Bishop was just one of a number of lifelong friends Wasserstein soon made in the New York theater scene. Another who shared Wasserstein’s wry humor was Christopher Durang, a playwright who first approached her by saying, “You look so bored, you must be very bright.” Durang and Wasserstein met as members of the Yale University School of Drama playwrighting class of 1976. There Wasserstein found that not only were plays not being written about women like her, but no one like her was writing plays; she was the only woman in the thirteen person class. Her Yale thesis project was also her first widely successful play, “Uncommon Women,” a play about eight Mount Holyoke graduates who reunite and reminisce about their college years.

In 1988, after three more successful plays, “The Heidi Chronicles” was produced at Playwright’s Horizons. This story of one woman’s quest for fulfillment quickly moved to Broadway and became an American classic. “The Heidi Chronicles” earned many awards including the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award. Impressively, she was able to follow “The Heidi Chronicles” with another Broadway hit, “The Sisters Rosensweig,” a 1992 play about three sisters and their very different struggles with identity.

Wasserstein’s also wrote the plays “Tender Offer,” “Isn’t it Romantic,” “The Man in a Case,” “An American Daughter,” “Old Money,” and “Third.” Her other work included the screenplay for “The Object of My Affection,” two books of essays, and “Pamela’s First Musical,” a children’s book that she adapted into a musical. In 1998 Wasserstein started Open Doors, a program to bring intelligent underprivileged students to New York. That same year, after attempts spanning over a decade, she gave birth to a daughter and achieved her dream of motherhood as a brilliant, resilient and witty single woman. Tragically Wasserstein died in 2006 due to lymphoma complications. The lights on Broadway were dimmed the next day in her honor.

Wendy Wasserstein was the first playwright to put modern women on the stage and gave them a voice. Her work was hailed as funny and accessible as well as being an honest investigation of a struggling driven generation of women. As people balancing careers, love lives and children, Wasserstein’s characters always have doubts and insecurity, but also great strength and insight. Her characters face dissatisfaction, uncertain identities, and societal pressure, with humor. They are always ready with punch lines and quips. Her plays are reflections of a world where people are self-aware individuals who find solidarity and overcome life’s difficulties without losing their ability to smile.

Further Reading:

Wikipedia Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Wasserstein
Jewish Women's Archive Biography: http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/wasserstein-wendy
New York Times Obituary: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/31/theater/31wasserstein.html
Playbill.com Obituary: http://www.playbill.com/news/article/96859
Michael Feingold Remembers her in The Village Voice: http://www.villagevoice.com/2006-01-24/theater/wendy-wasserstein/

Interview - Director Brian Katz, The Heidi Chronicles

Marketing Associate Alan Kline interviews director Brian Katz about “The Heidi Chronicles,” optimism, political movements, and the value of humor.

Alan: So Brian, why The Heidi Chronicles? What draws you to the play?

Brian: First of all, it’s an extremely funny play. The characters are well drawn and likable; you root for them. It has got the makings of a great play that way; it’s very universal. It actually is a unique play, I think, in that people have this sense of it as this prototypical feminist eighties play, and they’re completely wrong. While it’s a political play in its own right, it does not belong to a certain group or political movement, but is the story of those who don’t really fit in. They are intelligent, witty, and care, but they aren’t necessarily those in a certain ideology that lends itself to group movements and protests. While it’s set in a certain time period, I think what we showed last time around is that it didn’t really age if approached not as a piece of nostalgia, but as one person’s story.

Alan: You did a production of this play in 2006, why do it again?

Brian: We’re opening our new space at the Next Stage, which we are excited about. We wanted to introduce the space with an old favorite. We’ve heard from our audience that this is one of their favorite shows, so we wanted to bring it back as a treat and also to introduce our new neighborhood to us with a piece that people have really loved and gotten a lot out of. We also feel it epitomizes what we do. It’s a modern, award winning play. It is political with a small “p”, which is what we like, plays about individuals not about kings.

Alan: Are you planning to put it on as you did before? Or are you reconceptualizing it at all?

Brian: We feel we are taking the best of. It is a new space, so obviously we have to rethink a lot of things. We will be keeping elements that worked well, though slightly altering many of them. For example, this time around we’re having an artist do some framed art that will represent time and place. But they’ll still come off the wall scene by scene, like the photographs last time. We’re going further with the concept of the impressionist location, in that this will feel a little bit more like a hip museum. And of course there are new cast members who will have their own unique interpretations.

Alan: How would you characterize the play itself?

Brian: It’s a modern comedy, but it’s intellectual. We’ve always felt it’s a Woody Allen type story, that these are the people he knew too. Wasserstein writes what she knows, and she knows upper middle class women best. So it’s an intelligent upper middle-class comedy.

Alan: You mentioned that the play is often assumed to be feminist, though it isn’t. Heidi certainly encounters the feminist movement in the play, how do you feel the play addresses feminism?

Brian: It has feminism, but it’s a tricky word because it means something different to everybody. You know my background. My mother is certainly a feminist. She’s a professor. She was a professor in the 70’s where there was a ridiculous glass ceiling for her. But I was never taught that would ever drift to the side of aggression against anyone else. It’s about equality, period, with pay being the absolute number one issue. In the play, there are feminists I think Heidi is comfortable with and agrees with, and I think there are ones that she feels are on the wrong path. I think Wasserstein felt that way. I think she felt the movement abandoned women like her.

Alan: You said the play is about characters who don’t fit it. Do you see Heidi as the primary representation of this, or are all the characters in the play experiencing this?

Brian: Heidi is the character that embodies that the most, though they probably all have elements of it because we all do. But Heidi is the one who has everything going for her. She’s intelligent, she’s smart, she’s witty and yet she always seems to find herself on the outside. I’m not sure until the end of the play she’s really quite sure why that keeps happening.

Alan: In the monologues that begin the two acts, Heidi talks about women artists who are observers and outsiders …

Brian: Which is all of them, of course.

Alan: Right, and how they were forgotten. Do you see that as a model for Heidi through the play?

Brian: Oh no, I don’t think she’s forgotten at all. That’s why there’s hope in the play. I think there’s a lot of it. I think if you asked her she’d probably believe that we’re evolving in the right direction, that these are all improvements, that we are becoming more humane and more equal as time goes on.

Alan: So you see her as kind of an optimist?

Brian: Yeah, I think she is. She wouldn’t be so upset if she wasn’t, optimists are always the ones to get hurt. She has faith in people; otherwise how could her faith get wrecked at different points in the play? Otherwise she’s just a bitter angry character.

Alan: The play takes place over 24 years,. Although it is timeless, she is going through the events of her time. How do these affect the play?

Brian: Some of the scenes are set at very specific historical times, like the assassination of John Lennon. They’re used as tools to indicate where Heidi is. During the Lennon scene she is perhaps feeling some of her most aloof in the play, which may be where the country was at the time. It was a very strange transitional time moving out of the 70s into the 80s, out of the end of our idealism and into our “me, me, me” decade at its worst. And the character is always responding, because she is aware. She has strong feelings about these things. At the same time nothing changes. Those are universal themes of the play, alienation and setting out ones’ own path.

Alan: Are there any other major themes you explore when working on this play that we haven’t mentioned?

Brian: What we haven’t talked about too much is how funny the play is, how clever and witty a writer Wasserstein is. It makes the brain happy to have intelligent witty characters onstage saying intelligent witty things, and that should never go completely out of style. I don’t think everything has to be Noel Coward or Oscar Wilde, but I do think there’s a great place for a very witty intelligent play that makes you laugh at yourself. It helps us feel for these characters. I liked what you once said about Wendy as someone who hid her anger under humor. I think there’s always anger under humor. I don’t think she was an angry person, but I think she was disappointed for a while, and then maybe, like Heidi, came to terms with that to some extent. Wendy Wasserstein did find her own way to do it. We lost her tragically early. There was nobody more loved in the community. It was a major, major loss. Everyone agreed about how much she cared and how much support she gave others in theatre.