Emily Baker as Heidi in the New Jewish Theater’s production of THE HEIDI CHRONICLES, on stage at the St. Louis Jewish Community Center’s Performing Arts Building through June 15, 2025. Photo Credit: Jon Gitchoff. Courtesy of the New Jewish Theater
– By Cate Marquis –
The New Jewish Theater’s current production is a splendid version of Wendy Wasserstein’s “The Heidi Chronicles.” Director Ellie Schwetye takes a fresh look at a classic, award-winning play that was iconic to one generation, and re-imagines it as a human story for all generations, while adding iconic images and perfect music from that era, which propelled us into the current century. The result is a very winning and meaningful show.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning 1989 play chronicles, in sometimes funny and sometimes serious ways, the progress of feminism and women from the mid-1960s to the end of the 1980s, through chronicling the life of one Dr. Heidi Holland, professor of women’s art history at Columbia, from her high school days in 1965 to her life as the 1980s come to a close. That also makes it a chronicle of a generation, the Baby Boomers, who were a major force in the second half of the 20th century, a time period that set the groundwork for the current century.
All those cultural connections and history could have weighed down any production of this iconic play, making it feel too much something of another era. Luckily for us, director Ellie Schwetye wisely avoids this by making the play more a biography of this woman, Heidi. More a “life and times of Heidi” than the story of one era makes the play more about ideas, feminism, and humanity in a broader scope. This shift works beautifully, making the play feel fresh and accessible regardless of generation. Another big reason why this production succeeds so very well is actor Emily Baker in the lead role as Heidi Holland.
“The Heidi Chronicles” is set in New York City and then various locations around the U.S., follows the central character from her high school days at Miss Crain’s School in Chicago in 1965, to college at Vassar and graduate school at Yale, and on to her professional sucess as an author and a professor at Columbia but with more focus on her personal life, her feminist ideals and gradual disillusionments with American society in the 1980s.
The play opens with Dr. Heidi Holland (Emily Baker) giving a lecture on women in art history, illustrated by projections of some paintings by women on the wall on either side of the professor, as Dr. Holland discusses how gifted women artists have always been with us, but were often overlooked or even excluded, from histories and exhibits, and snubbed or worse in their own times.
These entertaining, informative tidbits of women’s art history pop up throughout the play but the greater part of the follows Heidi’s personal life, particularly three friendships, as she find professional success but has a more complicated personal and intellectual life.
From this first art history scene, we move back in time, to 1965 where we meet shy teenaged Heidi Holland at a high school dance with her best friend Susan Johnston (Kelly Howe), a much more high-energy, even flighty girl who is set on catching the attention of one boy she’s spotted across the room, and is equally determined to drag her shy friend out on the dance floor to meet some boys too. Heidi isn’t keen on the idea but one boy, Peter Patrone (Will Bonfiglio) introduces himself and asks her to dance. Peter is colorful, creative and fun, and immediately suggests they get married, but then counters, with “If we can’t marry, let’s be lifelong friends.”
Indeed they do become such friends, even best friends. Although women and female characters are a big part of this play as it follows Heidi’s life and career, in fact the play’s narrative thread focuses on her friendships with three people, the energetic, changeable Susan, the playful, quirky Peter and another man, Scoop Rosenbaum.
Heidi meets Scoop Rosenbaum when she’s in college, but while she is at a campaign office for Eugene McCarthy, the Democratic presidential candidate for 1968. Heidi is there as a volunteer for McCarthy, but Scoop is there as a journalist, for the radical magazine of which he is editor-in-chief. Scoop flirts with Heidi but while he is smart, handsome and can be charming, he is also arrogant and irritating, with a habit of giving everything a letter grade – people as well as a bowl of chips. Still, the sexual chemistry between them is undeniable, and Scoop is persistent. They have an on-and-off romance, and later a complicated long-term friendship.
Wasserstein’s play explores all those tumultous changes of the mid-’60s to the late ’80s through the lives of the characters. While Heidi keeps her ideals and her commitment to feminism and women artists in history, her friends are more changable. Susan shifts from radical political views and women’s collectives to ideal-free profit making in media. Scoop bounces from his political magazine, to one called Boomer, about their generation, and a host of other interests. Peter is a bit more steady like Heidi, committed to his career as a renowned pediatric surgeon, but he realised he is gay, and his personal life is more complicated, in the era before being openly gay was as accepted and when AIDS was ravaging that community.
There are many pivotal moments as the play takes Heidi through the ’70s and ’80s, with five brief scenes in the ’60s and ’70s in Act 1, and six short ones in the ’80s in Act II, exploring the changes in Heidi’s life and the times. One of the most striking is a scene in Act 2, where Heidi, Peter and Scoop are all invited onto a TV talk show, something set up through Susan’s media connections, a field she entered at the end of the ’70s. In this scene, Heidi is talked over and spoken for by both men, not just Scoop as is his nature, but her best friend Peter, leading to a post-show confrontation with both men. The scene is an example of how the play deals with various feminist issues but is played as being about their individual human relationships as well.
The acting, the set design, musical choices and the images projected all contribute to the power and effectiveness of this wonderful production. The cleverly designed stage set, where two back walls are angled to converge at the back of center stage. At the point where the walls converge there is a rotating section used to move props in and out for each short scene.
The large white walls also are used as a surface to project a series of images related to each little scene, either of the work of women artists in Heidi’s art history talks, or period B&W photos related to time each little scene takes place, often referencing cultural or historical events. Each of these projections come with music, mostly of the period music, set the tone.
The musical choices, by director Ellie Schwetye who also serves as sound designer, are superb, including Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” John Lennon’s “Imagine,” and Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me.”
Emily Baker is excellent as Heidi, taking the characters from shy teen to assured middle-aged woman. A slight, knowing smile often plays across Baker’s face, suggesting an intelligence and inner strength. While Heidi is steadfast in her feminist ideals and disappointed by society in the 1980s, her friend Susan changable. Kelly Howe is excellent, and often very funny, as energetic Susan, who goes from boy-mad teen to a Lesbian, from a leader of women’s art collectives and conscience-raising sessions, to a successful TV show producer, in a head-spinning shapeshifting. The play makes Susan represent the various shifting moods and fads, and Howe keeps pace with it all very well, keeping her interests changable but her shapeshifting nature somehow constant. Will Bonfiglio as Peter is completely charming and likable, someone both quirky and warmly human, funny and joking but heartbreaking at the same time. Joel Moses is marvelous as Scoop Rosenbaum, a character who is both maddening and a bit heartbreaking too. Moses gives one the sense that Scoop really loves Heidi, but doesn’t marry her, which breaks Heidi’s heart, because he wants a more submissive wife. The rest of the cast play various characters in and out of Heidi’s life as the ’70s and ’80s unspools but a significant one that reoccurs is Lisa, the woman who Scoop marries, played memorably by Courtney Bailey.
The New Jewish Theater’s “The Heidi Chronicles” is an impressive show, a refreshed look at a Pulitzer and a Tony-winning play for all generations, brilliantly directed by Ellie Schwetye and a cast led by a excellent Emily Baker, and featuring spot-on music. This is one show not to miss.
“The Heidi Chronicles” is on stage at the New Jewish Theater through June 25, 2025.
© Cate Marquis
