Wasserstein again depicts privileged boomers. The claim that they’re unhappy balances the false & self-satisfied cliches about their radicalism & importance.

Do plays count? Plays count.

A fun fact is that I thought I had already read this, but I was confusing it with Uncommon Women and Others. A bonus Wasserstein! What a delight.

The Heidi Chronicles has somewhat fallen out of favor since the great fanfare when it came out in 1988. That is too bad, because it is a wonderfully funny and insightful play. Starting in the mid-1960s, it tracks Heidi Holland and her friends over the next several decades. While it has some dated moments, and the final "closure" feels incredibly trite in 2016, most of the play is really delightful. Wasserstein is so witty and quick - able to evoke big ideas and events with only a few lines. I very much enjoyed this play, and this audiobook version was excellent - with very well chosen actors.

It's only April but we have a top contender for the worst play read in 2018. A boring slog through three decades with empty, soulless characters.

The late Wendy Wasserstein wrote this amusing play.  Reading it one is reminded of Eugene McCarthy's campaign for President and women's groups consciousness-raising sessions.  The play consists of a number of scenes, vignettes, taking place at one or two year intervals, as the same baby-boomer characters meet life challenges.  The humor is wonderful and the subject matter is memory-charged.

Heidi Holland, an easterner from Chicago, (get the joke?), is attending graduate school at Yale.  She has the sometimes interest of a man she met in the McCarthy campaign.  The other women in the group feel she is insufficiently liberated, but that she has the potential to be, in the jargon of our time, politically correct.  In another instance Heidi and Peter Patrone, her fiancee, a pediatrician, are attending the marriage of Scoop, a former beau of Heidi, and Lisa Friedlander, an illustrator.  Scoop tells Heidi that Lisa is not an A plus like Heidi but that Lisa is the best he can do.  Heidi's gift, a crock pot, is not to Scoop's liking.

In Act II Heidi is lecturing on Lilla Cabot Perry, an American Impressionist painter.  Lisa, very pregnant, is having a baby shower.  Heidi arrives late.  She has been living in England.  The friends speak of a family whose child did not get into the kindergarten at the Ethical Culture Society and so the whole family is in therapy.  In 1982 Heidi and friends appear on TV.  The topics presented include women in the arts and the Sixties.  Scoop Rosenbaum is editor of the BOOMER magazine.  (The name Scoop, of course, has to do with the fact that he claims he is a journalist.)  Scoop remarks portentiously that hearing his own children pulls him out of any "me generation" residue. Susan and Heidi meet for lunch.  It seems that Peter and Scoop monopolized the TV program and we learn that Peter and Heidi didn't marry.  In the lunch scene Susan speaks of a boy friend and Heidi does too.  Heidi is doing a small show of Lilla Cabot Perry's work.  Susan tells her that in L.A. everyone creates his own story, (title, THE HEIDI CHRONICLES).

Two years later Heidi is speaking to the Miss Crain's Association as an alumna.  Heidi tells of her trip to the gym and how she is embarassed in front of and envious of every woman present.  She allows that she hasn't been happy for some time.  The following year Heidi accepts a position to teach at Carleton College.  Before setting out to the Midwest Heidi sees Peter at his hospital.  It seems that the AIDS crisis, having great impact among his friends and acquaintances, has made it seem to him that sadness is a luxury.

My review may have made this play seem hopelessly self-referential, but it is not.  Wasserstein was too accomplished a playwright to fall into such a trap.

I ordered this initially because the DVD of the same name does not have closed captions and I am hard of hearing. It is a good script, but the movie doesn't follow it exactly. Wendy Wasserstein is a playwright of my generation and I like how she captures so many of the dilemmas women I know went through at the times the book covers.

This play has had great reviews from readers in America. Maybe it's because I'm a Brit, and missed some of the cultural echoes, but I found this very flat indeed. None of the characters appealed to me, and I didn't notice the humour others have mentioned. Overall, I won't be rushing out to see this performed, and I doubt I will read it again.

I thought this was okay but kind of difficult to follow.

Page 63 seems to be wrongly print because the last word/letters on the right margin side are cut.

Pages fell out after only a couple days of owning it. One page cropped the right side of the page out, and you could not read all of the text.

This play is very good that is why it won the Pulitzer Prize.  It is all about Heidi discovering who she is and how she fits in a world that is always changing.  It shows the different things that have happened in her life and all of the people who have made her who she is.  If you have not read it you should.

Seit einigen Jahren geht der Trend in der anglophonen Literaturwissenschaft ja sehr stark in Richtung Feminismus oder Queer-Studies und zahlreiche Texte werden im Hinblick auf diese Theorien neu aufgerollt. Da dies auf Dauer etwas ermüdend sein kann, empfand ich "The Heidi Chronicles" als sehr erfrischend, da Wasserstein die Feminismus-Bewegung durchaus kritisch betrachtet und die Frage aufwirft, ob Gleichberechtigung in der Gesellschaft nicht auch Schattenseiten birgt. Hinzu kommt ein Set von sehr sympathischen Charakteren, die einen sicherlich mehr als ein Mal zum Schmunzeln bewegen dürften. 100prozentige Kaufempfehlung!