"The Heidi Chronicles" director speaks on Wasserstein and Feminist interpretations Interview by Colin Foss '10 and Eleanor Johnstone '10

Author: Colin Foss and Eleanor Johnstone


Audio produced by Radio Arts Middlebury.

On Nov. 15-17 the Middlebury stage will be graced by Wendy Wasserstein's "The Heidi Chronicles," a production directed by Professor of Theatre and Women's and Gender Studies Cheryl Faraone. The many related events that have taken place on campus this week spurred The Middlebury Campus reporters Eleanor Johnstone '10 and Radio! Arts! Middlebury! Producer Colin Foss '10 to interview Ms. Faraone on the history and significance of the playwright and the play.

The Middlebury Campus: To begin, I think it would be helpful to hear a summary of the play.

Cheryl Faraone: "The Heidi Chronicles" is actually a chronicle of one woman's life moving through the late 1960s through the 1970s and the 1980s. It ends more or less on the verge of the 1990s. It encompasses a very well-educated, eastern-seaboard sensibility about women's lives during the women's movement and the changing and confusing expectations for women at that time.

TC: One of the main questions we've been asking ourselves is, "why Wasserstein, why now," especially given the number of related events this week. How do you see this play in the context of our day, and in light of her relatively recent and untimely death? Would you say it's a tribute to her memory or is it being produced more for the message?

CF: I think it's probably more a tribute. It's difficult to say 'feminist' these days. Almost any discussion on women's issues, on this campus, turns to the fact that 'feminist' is a dirty word. I think Wasserstein herself had some conflicts about it because of the polarization in the feminist movement. Now, do I think that every woman by birth is a feminist? Of course I do. But that's my own personal view. "Why now" is sort of a series of things. I had taught this in my Contemporary Women Playwrights class a year ago in the spring partially just to see what the student response to it was because the history in it is not very well known or, if it is, it comes down to us in sound bites and clichÈs. Somewhat to my surprise, they were really positive about it! I thought, "Well, that's interesting, what does this mean?" Of course, she died a very untimely death a year ago in January. What was interesting to me was the extraordinary outpouring of grief and celebration and response to her that happened all across the country. It was clear to me that this was a woman who had made a huge difference in a lot of people's lives. She was not without controversy because since she was so, relatively speaking, successful in Broadway terms, which is the commercial-theatrical epitome, a lot of women disliked her. There's a sense that if you participate in that system, you are somehow being co-opted by the system rather than bringing a different voice into that arena. I don't know which side of the argument I come down on, but because it seemed clear that because she was so powerful a voice and a human being I wanted to bring her to this campus. Although I have to admit that the total inciting suggestion was Richard Romagnoli's. We started thinking about doing it, and it ended up being me who did. And so I began thinking, if we're going to introduce her, let's introduce her multiply, let's put the play in a context because that is so important. The cast's first assignment over this summer was to interview a woman who had lived through the period and then come back and embody that person's voice while telling us what they had learned. For everybody this seemed to be a real eye-opener. So that was an eye-opener for me - it showed me that whatever they had heard felt so new. So the idea of broadening the awareness of this woman, her history and the history she was writing about, became a desire to help her voice live on after having been silenced so prematurely. When voices are silenced prematurely, you do feel like you want to help them live on a little bit.

TC: You said your students expressed a distinct appreciation for Wasserstein's work. How do you think Wasserstein makes feminist needs easier to swallow, and how does she define the modern feminist?

CF: She's an interesting combo - very warm, very human, very connective tissue and very relationship-oriented but with a little core of acerbic anger underneath it, which heightens the anger and plays against the sense of disappointment. She's not a Hallmark card. She writes in terms of how people relate to each other in a way that is really accessible. We read this play at the end of a semester in which we had engaged a lot of writers who were tougher, like Irene Churchill. When we studied this last semester there was a collective sigh in the class because it was someone writing about something that was important but might not require the same amount of struggle that others do to be comprehended.

TC: Is that how you interpret modern feminisms, as something a little less bra-burning?

CF: I actually think bra burning was such a miniscule portion of the feminist universe. It was good media, which is what I mean in terms of things coming down to us in soundbites that were probably hugely insignificant. I wish I knew what modern feminism was. It has at least four or five faces. It has the 'I'm-not-a-feminist' feminism, it has the 'I-became-a-feminist-at-the-time-of-the-women's-movement-and-I'm-very-clear-about-what-it-means' feminism and it has the anti-feminist feminism as in, 'I-get-to-choose-to live-the-most-conventional-way-and-if-you-tell-me-that-I can't-then-you're-not-a-feminist.'

TC: You are also producing a reading of Wasserstein's "Uncommon Women and Others," which, as I understand, was her thesis project at Yale Drama School. Where do you see Wasserstein in both this play and "Heidi," and can we see a distinct evolution of feminism or the awareness in feminism in these two plays?

CF: I know it's the first play that she's known for, and I'm not sure she didn't start it at Mount Holyoke, and maybe it is her thesis from Yale. I think that the plays are a continuous story. She has her characters embody clearer situations that can be identified with the feminist movement, but I wouldn't necessarily say that's the position she's writing from. It's a woman's voice, but I think she resists the label of feminism because it easily becomes ghettoized and people think, "Ok, therefore I'm going to stay away." She was at Mount Holyoke as an undergrad at a time when the rules changed midstream, and changed dramatically. Interestingly, one of the actresses in the cast, Justine Katzenbach '08.5, interviewed someone who was there with her and was able to give first-hand testimony to that. They had early curfews and were taught gracious living in the form of etiquette class and afternoon tea. And then all of a sudden it was about fulfilling oneself, getting a job, etc. So that ground suddenly shifted without providing women with any support as they dealt with that change. That's clear in both "Heidi" and "Uncommon Women," that the promises of women's relationships to each other were not fulfilled. Even at the end of "Heidi," Heidi says maybe it will be better for the next generation of women, like her daughter. And I hope it is.

TC: Is that intelligent, ambitious but self-doubting woman a common figure in history, and do you think that future generations can change that for women?

CF: I hope so. What's interesting to me is that we seemingly, socially, still struggle with that. And of course, social values end up being internalized as personal values. I had a conversation about working and raising a family in an academic place with a woman who is writing a book on her. The first question she asked me was, "Did you ever feel guilty bringing your daughter to day care?" I was appalled that she was asking me that! That a woman would ask another about her guilt level in choosing to work outside the home is vaguely appalling to me. I think we have to understand how many messages are being sent that
make it virtually impossible for us to disentangle what we really feel from what the culture around us is telling us that we need to feel. And until that happens I don't know that it's really going to move on.

TC: I guess one question I've been thinking over is how positive or negative of a statement we are seeing in "The Heidi Chronicles." By adopting a child at the end, is Heidi proudly saying that she can succeed without a husband, or is it a way of stepping out of society and retreating into herself to foster a life?

CF: I'm not sure it's either of those things. I think it's more that, 'I may have had a vision of my life that might have been more conventional in terms of becoming involved in a committed relationship and then having a family, but that isn't happening and I want to have a child, and I'm choosing to. In a way that's kind of eerie, for me, at the end of "Heidi," knowing that in a sense she was writing the life she was later going to lead. She had the child via artificial insemination and never identified the father, and I think that she was trying to figure that out as she wrote the play.

TC: Wasserstein came from a rich family with that Eastern, almost Martha's Vineyard mentality. Can you speak to how this played into her development and experience in women's rights?

CF: She grew up in Brooklyn in a very close-knit Jewish community. She writes beautifully about the Jewish experience, which is one of the reasons it's interesting that Heidi is not Jewish, although the bÍte noir of her life, Rosenbaum, is. I think that, at that point, American Woman and the Jewish culture had a real set of expectations of what the woman would grow up to be. Her brother, Bruce, is a very successful stock broker, and her sister, who is coming to the Saturday matinÈe, runs an inn with her husband in Manchester, Vt. But I think that Wendy had difficulty defying those expectations. All of her plays are autobiographical to a certain extent, but one of the most autobiographical is "Isn't It Romantic?" The play is between "Uncommon Women" and "Heidi," in which Janey, a well-educated daughter of loving, if suffocating, Jewish parents, defies expectations and refuses to marry a young doctor who has been hand-picked as the perfect husband. Wasserstein wrote an awful lot of social criticisms and a lot of them focus on themes of societal expectation, of struggling with your parents - especially one's mother. One of the last books she wrote was called "Sloth," which was originally a lecture she gave on one of the seven deadly sins. It makes you laugh, but you laugh with the razor gashes because it feels like she's so angry that we're expected to be committed citizens and part of the wheel that makes society churn. It's a hymn to the couch potato, in the sense that she's saying, "I defy. And I defy by lying down and refusing to play your games."

TC: The "we" for women in modern America is very complex, and growing up, for her, with a relatively privileged life, is a very complicated thing. What would you say are the pressures on women these days?

CF: Part of it is being made to feel as though you have to choose, and as you're choosing you're not only defining life for yourself but for everyone around you. You have extraordinary responsibilities for overlapping and surrounding circles of people. What does it feel like to be a woman now? Is that essentially female, and what exactly is that? Where do you stand, how do you stand, how does the idea of feminism overlap with capitalism? What are the values that this country lives by and how does one relate to that? It's incredibly complicated.

TC: Heidi is a successful art historian. From that position, I wonder if her perspective at all abstracted the issues that many women were addressing?

CF: Wasserstein extends beyond her social-economic class. She wrote what she knew, although she was very involved in life outside of the world she grew up in. She started a program for kids in minority high schools wherein kids got free tickets to Broadway shows and then met for pizza and discussion. She got those kids and what the importance of the program was for them. She writes about it really movingly, but she didn't write about it in the theatrical sense because she hadn't access to that as a theatrical writer.

TC: In a more theatrical tone, you mentioned laughing with the razor gashes. Wasserstein used humor a lot, but it was often rooted in a very dark sentiment. How has that affected your work with it on the stage?

CF: I don't often direct plays I've seen, but I've seen this play twice and both times came away really offended by the way some of the scenes were handed directorially. It felt like a lot of the female characters were treated like clichÈs, and one thing I was clear about when I took on this show was that that was never going to happen. I haven't paid a whole lot of attention to the humor - ≠I'm assuming that it's well-written enough that it'll be there on its own. I was much more interested in the three-dimensional aspect of the women. We found out pretty quickly that the scenes start on a level that can be seen as clichÈ, and, just as you're starting to wince, they take a huge turn. It makes you feel very subversed, because you think you know where you are, and you're smug about it and then suddenly everything changes.

TC: How do you hope the campus will take the show, and do you think that there is a need for it here?

CF: Of course I do. Any time anything as important as the history of the last 30 years is reduced to a clichÈ, of course you've got to take another look and say, just because it's been made into a funny TV series doesn't mean that it's laughable. I'm glad to introduce her voice because it's funny and humane, and we don't do a lot of work like that here. The things that "Heidi" was concerned with are things that are still dogging us. So, we'll see.

TC: Would you say that the work has any important conclusions?

CF: It's interesting that you're asking that because we're playing with doing more with the end. There's a lovely closure with Heidi and her daughter, and right now we're playing around with expanding out from that with a fairly lengthy curtain call that involves the whole cast and for some is very difficult. Yesterday, they asked, "Tell us why we're doing it, and maybe that'll help," and I said, "We're not doing it then, we're doing it now." I'd rather have the message of hope at the end of play, which I think is there, include more than just Heidi. I'd like to include more characters than just her. I don't want to dismiss all those people in her life, because you could argue that the play in some sense accuses them all of failing to come up to Heidi's standards but they're still depicted pretty lovingly, and so it's sort of like bringing them back. Some plays need to end pretty darkly, and "The Heidi Chronicles" is not one of them.

"The Heidi Chronicles" will be performed in Wright Theatre at 8 p.m. on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday and at 2 p.m. on Saturday.