There
is something more than a little ironic
seeing the iconic feminist set piece The Heidi Chronicles three days
after the title heroine’s near
contemporary unexpectedly lost the Presidency
to a boorish lout and bully.
Perhaps especially because the character
and the politician were products
of such similar backgrounds as intelligent, highly accomplished women from an elite academic background and high
professional ambitions. Both grew
up with the rise of the women’s movement
and moved into adulthood in times of tumultuous
cultural changes.
The
play was mounted at McHenry County
College’s more than ordinarily ambitious Black Box Theater under the expert guidance of veteran director and theater
teacher Jay Geller who routinely mounts
productions that stretch the limited expectations of community college productions. In fact productions at the Black Box
which mix student actors, graduates, and occasional professionals, are consistently among
the best stage offerings in McHenry
County.
The Heidi Chronicles came close to
that standard but fell a bit short
for reasons not entirely under the
control of the director or the attractive
young cast.
 |
| Playwright Wendy Wasserstein. |
Wendy Wasserstein’s 1988 play was
highly acclaimed and won both Tony and
Pulitzer Prize honors. Hailed as a feminist masterpiece it became a staple for community and
college theaters and has been frequently mounted by urban companies, both professional and earnest small troops.
It
is sometimes compared to another acclaimed feminist play, Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues
which premiered just eight years later in 1996. Heidi suffers by comparison. The
Vagina Monologues was a much grittier
play and a braver one. Wasserstein’s play seems frozen in amber by the 25 year time span it documents. Ensler’s work is fresher for being ever evolving and regularly adding new monologues that reflect current events and taking an expansive world-wide view of women’s experiences. Heidi’s
elite world seems cramped and
the conflicted angst of its denizens somewhat shallow as both of the major
male characters—the smarmy sometime
love/lust interest and the glib gay
man best friend ironically point out.
In
a lot of way the play represents the obsessions
of many of the leaders and shaping thinkers of the Feminist movement, many of whom came out the same Seven Sister School backgrounds and the
self-contained world of New York intellectuals. Even the founders of MS Magazine at first seemed to be
concerned mainly with establishing
powerful careers, achieving autonomy
from reliance on men for validation, and “having it
all.” The struggles
of working class women, women of color, or even middleclass homemakers and mommy-trackers who were often cast enemies, seemed utterly alien to this
brand of sisterhood.
That
was certainly the problem that my deeply
feminist wife Kathy had with the production. She is a working class girl from Chicago, a last-minute high school dropout, young bride then struggling single mom of two
who after working since she was 14 finally found a career path in mid-life, got
her B.A. and Masters Degrees in years of night
classes, and became a respected religious
educator. She found almost no common
ground with the characters presented to her and hardly recognized their struggles as Feminist.
Kathy
was most deeply offended by Wasserstein’s portrayal of a consciousness raising rap group set in the college town of Ann Arbor,
Michigan in 1970, just as the women’s movement was making a sharp, militant turn and flirting
with angry separatism. Urban groups
like that were an important part of Kathy’s development and a source of support
and encourage. Here the women are
reduced to symbolic stereotypes—the recently empowered housewife, the high school girl victimized by her parents discovery of the sexual revolution, the cultural faddist, and the angry lesbian—in the play’s most comic scene. The women in it, or variations on them, will
show up through the rest of the play in the vignettes of Heidi’s life, all
of them highly successful but
profoundly disconnected and ambivalent.
So,
ok, let’s take the play for what it is
and not try and blame it for what it
never set out to be. The play stretches from a high school dance at a toney girl’s prep school in Chicago in 1965 to a New York loft apartment
in 1989. Wasserstein tracks the changes whirling through her
episodic play with a heavy reliance
on pop music—the kind of soundtrack-of-your-life trick borrowed from
innumerable romantic comedies—and a slew of casual cultural references meant to set the audience’s head’s nodding with knowing understanding.
But
in 2016, a couple of generations
after the play’s blackout, director
Geller recognized the inherit problem of staging it for a new audience. His semi-clever
answer was to include a five page glossary
of the references in the program
ranging from the esoteric Renaissance women painters that art historian Heidi references
in her opening lecture, but such
jaw-droppingly obvious ones as Richard Nixon and John Lennon whose resignation
and memorial service were symbolically coincidental with scenes from
Heidi’s life.
Try
as they might, the earnest young cast can only glibly reel off the references without always seeming to understand their significance through no fault of their
own.
The
Friday night audience was the sparsest
I have ever seen at a Black Box production—only about 30 people leaving plenty
of empty seats in the intimate performance space. About half were, like Kathy and I, Heidi’s
contemporaries. The rest were student
age or just past. Judging from the
reactions, a lot of those references went over the heads of the younger members
but elicited knowing but subdued
chuckles from us geezers.
By
the way, Kathy drew my attention to the absence
of men in attendance. Including myself there were just 5,
another older man with his mate, and
a young gay couple. Most McHenry
County Trump era men could apparently not be dragged to the theater for a Feminist show. Friday night is date night, Kathy observed.
Presumably men dragged their
women to the action-movie-of-the-moment
instead.
 |
| The cast and the crew: Front row left to right: Matthew Torres, Samantha Catalano, Lara Bell, Jess Piekarski, Monica Hauschild. Back row left to right: Sean Plotts, Sam Prather, Emily Piesens, Kacie Swanson, Celia Villacres, Vince Calucci. |
Still,
the play was not without its charms
and rewards. Emily Piesens was appealing as Heidi—beautiful,
brainy, emotionally cut off, confused,
and conflicted. The two male leads were also powerful
to the point of scene stealing,
which worked most effectively when
both show up on a morning TV panel and
completely override Heidi.
Sean Potts as best pal Peter Patrone has to overcome
being written as too arch, but redeems himself and his character in
what is play’s most potent emotional
moment as he lashes out in anger and grief as a Gay man who has attended too many memorial services for
AIDS victims and calls out Heidi for her blithe self-absorption.
Vince Calucci nailed Scoop Rosenbaum—swaggering, glib, charismatic, exuding unctuous charm with a sincerely thin veneer of idealism and a reservoir of ambition. He is the bad boy Heidi falls for and
can never quite get over although
she knows every one of his many faults. Meant to be a shameless cad, in Calucci’s hands Scoop is none-the-less more human and sympathetic than the parade of Heidi’s two-dimensionally drawn friends.
For
me the epiphany of the night came in
the first act closing scene where
Heidi confronts Scoop at the wedding to
the woman he is settling for to facilitate his career. Heidi is clearly better off without him
but can’t quite let go as the lights dim and the two dance as the bride awaits
in the ballroom. It occurred to me that Hillary Clinton—even
more talented and ambitious than Heidi—married her Scoop Rosenbaum and stuck with him through triumphs and humiliating shenanigans that would have made Scoop himself blush.
The
play ends with Heidi alone in her
new nearly empty apartment rocking her newborn child to sleep. Content? Well maybe
just for this one moment.
That
ending proved to be an omen in Wasserstein’s
own life. In 1999, ten years after the closing scene,
she gave birth to a daughter at age
48. Six years later on January 30, 2006
she died lymphoma. The lights
of Broadway dimmed in her honor.
