“We’re all concerned, intelligent, good women,” says the eponymous Heidi of The Heidi Chronicles. “It’s just that I feel stranded. And I thought the whole point was that we wouldn’t feel stranded.”
Or as another woman says in Isn’t It Romantic?, “No matter how lonely you get or how many birth announcements you receive, the trick is not to get frightened.”
Get the picture? A decade and a half ago, when Heidi first hit, an American journalist living in London told me she could never understand why these characters were always so unhappy—and then she went to interview the author. And she took one look at her and it explained the whole play in a way that casting Joan Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis as Heidi can’t. “She’s like a bag lady, a derelict,” my journalist friend told me. “You feel like saying, ‘Get your hair done, lose weight, don’t dress like you’ve been sleeping in the street.’ But, if you did, there wouldn’t be any play.”
She wasn’t wrong. Wendy Wasserstein was a disheveled mess, a cuddly giggly bundle of a scarecrow—at least on the few occasions I met her—but she was a hard person to dislike. She once told me she’d met Colin Powell at the opening of the Cameron Mackintosh/RSC production of Carouseland “I was very impressed by him, even though he’s a Republican.” She did her trademark giggle as she said it: she meant it, but she
