Start a Revolution! Trace the Evolution of Wendy Wasserstein's Groundbreaking Play The Heidi Chronicles

When Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles opened on Broadway in 1989, it was nothing short of revolutionary. The play tracks 20 years in the life of art historian Heidi Holland, from 1960s high schooler, to budding feminist, to working professional making difficult decisions about men, politics and motherhood. Even now, when Heidi's choice to have a child on her own seems more de rigeuer than radical, issues of gender politics and equality are still hot-button topics on national and international political fronts. Read up on the play and its remarkable writer here, and see The Heidi Chronicles when it opens at the Music Box Theatre on March 19, starring Elisabeth Moss, Jason Biggs and Bryce Pinkham.

All in the Family
There's a reason Wendy Wasserstein stood head and shoulders above her playwriting peers—she had to. Born in Brooklyn in 1950, Wendy was the youngest of five children, with a theater-loving mother she compared to Auntie Mame. Her mom had a flair for ordering takeout for Thanksgiving dinner, but according to Julie Salamon's biography of the playwright, could also be undermining and hyper-critical. Wasserstein graduated from the all-female Mount Holyoke College in 1971, when the female experience in the United States was in flux, an experience that would shape her career and worldview forever.

Finding Her Voice
Wasserstein went on to Yale to study playwriting, the only woman in her small “kind of bizarre macho class,” classmate and friend Christopher Durang told The Paris Review. "There were an awful lot of would-be Sam Shepards, and Wendy felt a little left out." Her playgoing experience was hardly better. "I remember going to them and thinking, I really like this, but where are the girls?" Wasserstein once said. Her thesis project at Yale, Uncommon Women and Others, mined her experience and those of her Mount Holyoke fellows, daughters of the baby boom generation finding their footing in a world that no longer proscribed their futures. The play would become her first big professional hit, produced off-Broadway in 1978 starring Swoosie Kurtz, Glenn Close and Jill Eikenberry.

Introducing Heidi Holland
These ideas, that women of Wasserstein’s generation "were given new obligations without being released from the old ones" found fuller expression ten years later in The Heidi Chronicles. Heidi, modeled largely on Wendy herself, is an art historian intent on educating people about female artists lost to history, but while she succeeds professionally her personal life flounders. Under the hand of her frequent collaborator, director Daniel Sullivan, Heidi premiered off-Broadway in 1988 and transferred to Broadway in 1989, starring Joan Allen, Boyd Gaines, Peter Friedman and Cynthia Nixon (playing several small roles that Sarah Jessica Parker, above, had played off-Broadway). "[Wasserstein gives us] a picture of women who want it all—motherhood, sisterhood, love and boardroom respect," wrote critic Mel Gussow.

A Feminist Threat?
Wasserstein's female roles may have been a godsend for actresses sick of playing one-dimensional stereotypes, but Heidi wasn't welcomed with open arms by all feminists. "In depicting Heidi as troubled over career and family, Wendy Wasserstein inadvertently fed a media hype, a new feminine mystique about the either/or choices in a woman's life," Betty Freidan told the Christian Science Monitor. Gloria Steinem disagreed: "To have a play on Broadway about the change that a woman goes through in her life; to be in a situation where hundreds of thousands of people have sat completely absorbed in the life choices of a particular woman...this is a revolution in itself."

Crack in the Glass Ceiling
Wendy Wasserstein became the first woman ever to win a Tony Award for Best Play in 1989 for The Heidi Chronicles (and incredibly, only one other woman has won it since—Yasmina Reza, who has won twice). She also earned the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. A roster of Broadway heavy hitters later joined Heidi as replacements, including Christine Lahti, Brooke Adams, David Hyde Pierce and Tony Shalhoub. The chemistry was undeniable—both Allen and Adams married their Scoop Rosenbaums, Friedman and Shalhoub, respectively (although Allen and Friedman later divorced). But wait, there's more awards for Heidi! Wasserstein's 1995 TV adaptation starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Kim Catrall and Tim Hulce garnered several Emmy nominations, and a Best Supporting Actor win for Hulce.

The Next Chapters
After the success of The Heidi Chronicles, Wasserstein became one of the most beloved members of the New York theater community. She was nominated for a second Tony Award for The Sisters Rosensweig in 1993, but lost out to Tony Kushner for Angels in America: Millennium Approaches. Her 1997 play An American Daughter was her only other play to make it to Broadway, but she produced several more works off-Broadway at Lincoln Center and wrote the screenplay for The Object of My Affection. She wrote frequently and candidly for the New Yorker and the New York Times, including the story of her miraculous pregnancy. She gave birth to daughter Lucy Jane in 1999 at age 48—and her decision to keep the identity of the father a lifelong secret drew more than a few comparisons to Heidi Holland's decision to become a single mother. She also kept her protracted battle with lymphoma a secret; few knew she was sick until soon before Wasserstein passed away in 2006 at age 55.

Back on Broadway
For a play that's pushing 30, The Heidi Chronicles remains intensely relevant. "In retrospect, what stands out is that Heidi remains single," wrote Ginia Bellafante in The New York Times. Finding the ideal Heidi was imperative, and Elisabeth Moss, fresh from her glorious run as '60s secretary-turned-advertising powerhouse Peggy Olsen in Mad Men, seemed a perfect choice. "I'm very interested in playing [Heidi] as a modern woman," Moss told Broadway.com. "I know that the time period is an influence on who she is, but at the same time I think that she's just like us, and has the same issues and the same problems and the same questions, so I'm interesting in finding out who she is in any decade. I feel like you could change a couple of names and events, and [Heidi] could easily be this year.”