Word: heidi
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...comedy, Isn't It Romantic, which ran for two years off-Broadway, is a thinly veiled tale of Wasserstein's relations with her own larger-than-life mother. But even here, Janie Blumberg, the playwright's alter ego, rejects a suffocating marriage with a very eligible doctor and utters Heidi-esque lines like "I made choices based on an idea that doesn't exist anymore." Still, the spirit of the play is more aptly conveyed by Janie's comically maladroit efforts to cook a roast chicken for her boyfriend...
Only in a written playscript does Wasserstein allow herself to be assertive. In conversation, she flees from all self-important declarations of artistic intention. It takes coaxing for Wasserstein just to admit that Heidi represents her bid "to demand attention and announce, 'I have something to say, and I want you to listen.' " She is much more comfortable recalling Heidi's early off-Broadway previews when she was scared that "all the people from Isn't It Romantic would show up waiting for the chicken jokes." Here her voice breaks into a hypertheatrical tone as she parodies the reaction...
Even today, there is something unreal for Wasserstein in seeing her name illuminated on a marquee in the heart of New York City's theater district. "I'm an off-Broadway baby," she explains. "When my friends and I write, we imagine small audiences." In fact, The Heidi Chronicles was originally written to be performed at the tiny, 156-seat Playwrights Horizon, the nurturing off-Broadway base camp for a generation of younger playwrights like Wasserstein. Only after the play opened at Playwrights last December to rave reviews and a sold-out three-month run were arrangements made to transport...
Initially, at least, Marcuse has found a niche on Broadway, with Heidi playing to houses roughly 90% full. Many of the reviews have been a press agent's dream. The New York Daily News's critic hailed Heidi's recent arrival on Broadway with this pronouncement: "I doubt we'll see a better play this season." The other New York papers, as is the custom, chose to let their off- Broadway reviews stand. An "enlightening portrait of her generation," declared the Times, while Newsday poured on the laudatory adjectives: "smart, compassionate, witty, courageous." There were some sharp dissents. TIME...
Wasserstein compares the gathering momentum of her theatrical career to the children's story The Little Engine That Could. Heidi was written in 1987 after a frustrating period that included a musical that never made it out of workshop readings and a filmscript for Steven Spielberg that was shelved. Then, as now, she was living in a Greenwich Village apartment, with no formal attachments aside from a cat named Ginger. Relentlessly social, Wasserstein has built a life revolving around an intricate network of friendships, many with other playwrights. But writing Heidi represented, in part, an acknowledgment that Wasserstein, like...