|
| |
   
HEIDI CHRONICLES
PERFORMANCE DATES: Feb 22,23,24,29 Mar 1
REHEARSALS BEGIN IN JANUARY ( TUES, THURS, SUN)
Comedy/Drama by Wendy Wasserstein
Cast: 3 men, 5 women: 8 total
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award, the New York Drama Critics Circle
Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, the Hull -Warriner
Award and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. A significant and celebrated play,
which was first presented by Off-Broadway's
Playwrights Horizons and went on to become a long-run
Broadway success. Funny, touching, and written with rare grace and sensitivity,
the play is a moving examination of the progress of a generation, from the
socially and politically activist sixties to the success-oriented
eighties—a time during which the status of American women underwent profound,
and sometimes unsettling, change. "…not many plays manage Heidi's feat of
inducing almost continuous laughter while forcing the audience to examine its
preconceptions.
THE STORY: Comprised of a series of interrelated scenes, the play traces
the coming of age of Heidi Holland, a successful art historian, as she tries to
find her bearings in a rapidly changing world. Gradually distancing herself from
her friends, she watches them move from the idealism and political radicalism of
their college years through militant feminism and, eventually, back to the
materialism that they had sought to reject in the first place. Heidi's own path
to maturity involves an affair with the glib, arrogant Scoop Rosenbaum, a
womanizing lawyer/publisher who eventually marries for money and position; a
deeper but even more troubling relationship with a charming, witty young
pediatrician, Peter Patrone, who turns out to be gay; and increasingly
disturbing contacts with the other women, now much changed, who were a part of
her childhood and college years. Eventually Heidi comes to accept the fact that
liberation can be achieved only if one is true to oneself, with goals that come
out of need rather than circumstance. As the play ends she is still "alone," but
having adopted an orphaned baby, it is clear that she has begun to find a sense
of fulfillment and continuity that may well continue to elude the others of her
anxious, self-centered generation. |
Palos
Village Players