Moss overdoes Heidi’s fragile vulnerability and doesn’t endow her with much of a backbone. Perhaps it’s the low-key lead performance by Elisabeth Moss of Mad Men fame. Perhaps it’s the direction by Pam MacKinnon, which tends towards the sitcom in some of the more satiric scenes such as a 1970s consciousness-raising vignette and is strangely muted in the big moments between Heidi and her on-again, off-again romantic partner Scoop Rosenbaum, an obnoxious but attractive magazine editor. The issues still resonate, but the first Broadway revival of this Pulitzer Prize-winner feels somehow diminished. Wasserstein, who died at 55 in 2006, detailed Heidi’s trek with wit and compassion. Heidi feels abandoned, but ultimately relies on herself for fulfillment, adopting a baby and looking to the future with hope. Her women friends go on different tracks, some forsaking ideals for money, others giving up their dreams for husbands and kids. An art historian specializing in neglected female painters, Heidi pursues her work passions, but the men in her life are either emotionally unavailable or gay. Born at the end of the Baby Boom, she comes of age just as doors are being broken down and women are forced to choose between family and careers rather than opting for both. Heidi Holland, the heroine not unlike Wasserstein, is in the generation between housewives and “have-it-all” superwomen. Wendy Wasserstein’s bittersweet survey of one woman’s journey through social upheavals, female empowerment, sexual revolutions, and the morning after evaluated the impact of the feminist movement with equal measures of humanity, humor and sorrow. When The Heidi Chronicles opened Off-Broadway in 1988 and then transferred to Broadway a year later, it perfectly captured its historical moment.
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