Dig those bell bottoms — big, elephant bell bottoms with the waist cut up around the rib cage and yards of denim washed to baby blue. Can you believe people once bought these jeans not as a joke but because they were chic?
Heidi Holland wears a pair for a while as she chronicles her weary path from 1965 high school grad to late '80s art historian. She was stylish then, just as her angsty uncertainty about her life fit the zeitgeist. We had the luxury of burrowing into our small lives — what they call today first-world problems.
Bell bottoms such as Heidi wore are not timeless and neither, unfortunately, are the circumstances and characters in Wendy Wasserstein's "The Heidi Chronicles," which opened Friday at the Guthrie Theater.
Perhaps nostalgia governed our expectations that this Pulitzer and Tony winner from 1989 would reveal eternal truths about fulfillment (or lack thereof) through Heidi's commentary on her life and times. Rather, the realization creeps up during director Leigh Silverman's flat production that these people are temporal and unlikable. Scoop Rosenbaum has an impossible ego; Peter Patrone is precious and Heidi herself is never happy.
That, of course, was Wasserstein's intention — to show how this shy, bookish young woman never quite found the sweet spot of contentment in an era when women were urged to "have it all."
Her friends made firm choices — to torch their undergarments and steep themselves in a women's collective, to be a mother and wife, or to feed at the trough of soulless success. Whiny Heidi only smiles at them — a smile that judges with its passive color of disappointment.
Actor Kate Wetherhead plays Heidi much as the character sees herself — "a highly informed spectator." She is intelligent, friendly, thoughtful and fearful about sticking her toe into the waters of life.
Heidi watches in fear as her friend Susan (Tracey Maloney) lusts for a guy who can smoke a cigarette and twist his hips at the same time. Her closest friendship with a man is platonic: Peter (Zach Shaffer) wants to dance when he's a little tipsy and to save the world when he's earnest. His sexual orientation, though, limits the relationship. Scoop (Ben Graney), who woos Heidi at a Gene McCarthy rally with his intelligence and resourcefulness, is a cad who rarely examines his philandering, self-important life.
