When the first Broadway revival of The Heidi Chronicles officially opens on Thursday night, starring Elizabeth Moss in the title role, the play — about a woman and her generation’s often-fraught relationship to feminism — will be more than 25 years old. But much of its subject matter is likely to resonate.
The original was a hit, spurring its move from off-Broadway to Broadway in 1989 (even though TIME’s first take on the show found that it was “like an unconscious cartoon of feminist dialectic” full of “mostly whiny and self-congratulatory cliches”). Once it was a sure thing that the Broadway version would be a hit too, the playwright explained to TIME that she had written it because she had “something to say”:
”I wrote this play because I had this image of a woman standing up at a women’s meeting saying, ‘I’ve never been so unhappy in my life,’ ” Wasserstein explains. ”Talking to friends, I knew there was this feeling around, in me and in others, and I thought it should be expressed theatrically. But it wasn’t. The more angry it made me that these feelings weren’t being expressed, the more anger I put into that play.”
But Wasserstein is far too deft a satirist, and far too gentle a person, to compose a screed. Instead, with subtlety and humor in The Heidi Chronicles, she has written a memorable elegy for her own lost generation. Heidi tells the story of a slightly introverted art historian, a fellow traveler in the women’s movement, who clings to her values long after her more committed friends switch allegiance from communes to consuming. At the pivotal moment in the play’s second act, Heidi (played by Joan Allen) stands behind a lectern on a bare stage, giving a luncheon speech to the alumnae of the prep school she once attended. Slowly the successful veneer of Heidi’s life is stripped away as she tries to ad-lib a free-form answer to the assigned topic, ”Women, Where Are We Going?” Heidi’s soliloquy ends with these words: ”I don’t blame any of us. We’re all concerned, intelligent, good women.” Pause. ”It’s just that I feel stranded. And I thought that the whole point was that we wouldn’t feel stranded. I thought the point was that we were all in this together.”
Read the full 1989 interview with Wasserstein, here in the TIME Vault: Chronicler of Frayed Feminism
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