"stirring, hilarious, ... poignant"

Aug. 18, 2006 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

"The Heidi Chronicles," the late Wendy Wasserstein's 1988 award-winning play that traces the life a talented baby-boomer through two and a half decades of wanting to have it all in a man's world, is playing in a stirring, hilarious, and at times, poignant production at the Berkshire Theatre Festival.

The episodic play begins in a prolog in which Heidi, aged around forty, has become a successful art historian, still valiantly attempting to interest the art world in the works of neglected women artists .The time is 1989 However the play proper begins in 1965 and, episodically moved along by period music and period costumes, covers 25 years, ending in 1989 again.

The plot centers on Heidi herself, present in every scene and luminously played by the talented Kate Jennings Grant who never misses a beat in making us believe and identify with the charming but determined young woman Heidi Holland is and becomes.

Heidi and the two men in her life, Peter Patrone (Tom Story) and Scoop Rosenbaum (Scott Lowell) center the plot. These three move though the decades it covers, and it is important that the careers and life choices of all three matter, because although ultimately it is Heidi's story, it is much more than a feminist tract. The men, too, have agendas, life choices, and even compromises.

Passing time in these three lives is evoked by vocal music and by well-recognized locations and events that cue one in to the years as the play moves from a McCarthy Rally in New Hampshire, to a John Lennon vigil in Central Park and the Reagan years.

In journalist Scott, Lowell creates a delightful, buoyant, extravert whose several careers will soar to running his own publication, and marriage to a non-threatening woman whom he cannot possibly love since at the play's end he still loves Heidi whom they both agree he could not possibly have married.

Gay, successful pediatrician , Peter, whom Heidi met at a high-school dance remains her best friend, in and out of her life, but experiencing decades in which the Aids crisis touches him personally. He is loyally present on a lonely Xmas at a moment when Heidi, considering a drastic career move, badly needs a friend.

The poignant scenes, usually interspersed with wit as well as poignancy, are alternate with group scenes, revealing various events (consciousness raising, marches on museums, baby showers,) –women centered.

These, as staged in this production are the crowd pleasers, full of humor but unfortunately tending toward caricature rather than character drawing. That Heidi is a part of them but maintains her very real character is an example of how finely etched her character in this play is.

The actresses, who in what seems like only seconds, manage to swoop into wings and emerge with a different hair-do and period costume, all perform with skill and dedication but are rarely women in whom one can believe although they manage to suggest such extremely different types one scarcely recognizes them from one scene to another.

For this they should be commended and one is amazed at curtain call to be reminded how so few of them managed to perform so many roles. Startling costume and hair arrangements transform them, and each manages to pull (usually fuinny or predatory female types) into fine performances.

Less doubling could possibly have lead to more realistically sketched roles, but perhaps the over-playing was intentional on both the part of the playwright and director And the scenes kept the audience a-roar and kept the play from tipping into feminist angst.

The play ends on a realistic note with Scoop accusing Heidi, who has adopted a baby girl of trying to prove she can have it all—reach that number ten when he has been willing to settle for a six he knew he could reach.

But Heidi is undaunted, if a bit rueful, and suggests perhaps her baby and his son, Pierre, might meet someday and work things out better than she and Scott have been able to.

Meanwhile, almost two decades later, things seem, regretfully, not too different, and in our increasingly fragmented world, decisions still plague the descendants .of those baby boomers Wasserstein has so lovingly put on the stage.

Her recent death at an early age after having accomplished so much in the theatre world, is a significant loss to the current American theatre, but her accomplishments are ones for which women, including the actresses who play her roles, can be grateful.

The current BTF production celebrates her competently.

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