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.