Heidi Chronicles

Winning the Pulitzer Prize for drama for her "Heidi Chronicles" was "a total surprise," said Wendy Wasserstein in a brief telephone interview Thursday. "One doesn't know how these things work. I didn't even know if I was nominated." But she feels "really honored" by the award.

Wendy and the Lost Boys The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein Julie Salamon Penguin Press: 461 pp., $29.95 Along with their crackling urban wit, Wendy Wasserstein's plays are notable for their introspective candor about the plight of certain well-educated baby boomer women - "uncommon women," to borrow the phrase from her breakthrough drama "Uncommon Women and Others" - trying to reconcile professional ambitions with personal...

"The Heidi Chronicles"--a bitingly witty chronicle of a woman's odyssey through the post-Kennedy decades--has finally made it to television. And it's a good thing that author Wendy Wasserstein held out for a production that would provide a faithful representation of her 1988 Pulitzer Prize-winning play. The two-hour version that premieres on TNT Sunday is a rare example of the medium's capacity to entertain and inform while generating deep currents of emotion.

PLAYWRIGHT Wendy Wasserstein's death Monday, at 55, from lymphoma, saddened the theater community, surprised the public and deeply shocked women of a certain time and mind-set in ways we can't quite get our minds around.

In spite of its Pulitzer Prize, Wendy Wasserstein's "The Heidi Chronicles," at Saddleback College's Studio Theatre, has some of the problems rampant in many current plays. "Heidi's" 11 scenes and two monologues, cinematic in their brevity and shallowness of character development, do not give a director much help in creating a dramatic through-line (as opposed to a vast historical chronology).

The hit signals have gone off in New York about "The Heidi Chronicles." Wendy Wasserstein's new comedy opened at Playwrights' Horizons on Sunday night, to reviewer delight. Wasserstein's subject is the same as in her first two plays, "Uncommon Women" and "Isn't It Romantic"--the perplexities of being a bright, liberated woman whose life isn't falling into place as planned. Many other playwrights have also addressed this theme.

The Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company courted her but the San Diego Repertory Theatre got her. Heidi--as in Wendy Wasserstein's Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning play, "The Heidi Chronicles"--was one sought-after lady. Both theaters wanted to present Wasserstein's chronicle of a woman's passage from the 1960s through the 1980s during their 1991-92 seasons.

"Jerome Robbins' Broadway," a collection of dazzling dance numbers from some of the famed choreographer's biggest hits, won the Tony Award on Sunday as best musical of the 1988-89 Broadway season. The show, which features excerpts from "West Side Story," "Fiddler on the Roof," "Gypsy" and other Robbins musicals, took a total of six Tonys, including one for Robbins as director of the musical. "The Heidi Chronicles," Wendy Wasserstein's comedy about one woman's 20-year journey to self-fulfillment, was named best play.

"I feel stranded," says art historian Heidi Holland, talking to a group of alumnae from Miss Crain's School, "and I thought the whole point was that we wouldn't feel stranded. I thought the point was that we were all in this together." In a nutshell, or a phrase, that's what "The Heidi Chronicles" is all about: feeling stranded in the '80s. Except that this is the '90s, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Wendy Wasserstein play that opened Sunday at the James A.

It was Yom Kippur, and Wendy Wasserstein was at temple checking out the woman sitting nearby, the one surrounded by her mother and her daughters. The woman, who was about Wasserstein's age, was all in purple--purple suit, matching high heels, a diamond as big as Bergdorf's, hair coiffed into a nature-defying confection. "I wondered, 'Who is this person? Will I ever be her?' " Wasserstein said recently. "Will she ever be me?"

Wendy Wasserstein, who won a Pulitzer Prize, a Tony Award and considerable popularity writing comic yet pointed plays and essays about the nagging choices and disappointments that many Baby Boom women encountered on the path to "having it all," died Monday. She was 55. Wasserstein died at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, according to Andre Bishop, artistic director of the Lincoln Center Theater. The cause of death was lymphoma.

Heidi Fleiss got out of jail Thursday. I was hoping for something different. I was hoping she'd bust out. A jailbreak. Heidi on the lam. Helicopters overhead. Nationwide dragnet. Notorious "Hollywood Madam" reportedly spotted by a Cub Scout troop somewhere in North Dakota. Heidi's mug on a post office bulletin board. "America's Most Wanted" offering a reward for info on her whereabouts.

By coincidence, all three plays reviewed this week have film connections: Wendy Wasserstein's "The Heidi Chronicles" and Brian Clark's "Whose Life Is It, Anyway" have been filmed ("Heidi" for TV), and David Mamet's "Speed-the-Plow" is set in a Hollywood studio. Further, Wasserstein and Mamet have written current films: "The Object of My Affection" and "The Spanish Prisoner," respectively.

In the TV-movie based on Wendy Wasserstein's 1988 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Jamie Lee Curtis (pictured) stars as Heidi Holland in a role that takes her from the intellectual optimism of a mid-'60s high school graduation to a late-'80s, coming-to-grips acknowledgment of the world as it is.

Wendy Wasserstein was "beyond nervous" about bringing her watershed 1988 Broadway comedy-drama "The Heidi Chronicles" to the small screen. She was "terrified." "You feel very protective of ... a play which meant a lot to you and to other people," Wasserstein explains. She notes she recently saw a high school production of "Heidi," which won her a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award. "It's just fine as a play. I said, 'Fine. There it is. It's alive and well.'

"The Heidi Chronicles"--a bitingly witty chronicle of a woman's odyssey through the post-Kennedy decades--has finally made it to television. And it's a good thing that author Wendy Wasserstein held out for a production that would provide a faithful representation of her 1988 Pulitzer Prize-winning play. The two-hour version that premieres on TNT Sunday is a rare example of the medium's capacity to entertain and inform while generating deep currents of emotion.

Taking the timeless author's dictum "Write what you know" very much to heart, playwright Wendy Wasserstein has built a career documenting the dreams, pursuits and foibles of the "Me" generation. Clearly she knows them very well.

"I get letters like: 'The first act was my life but the second act wasn't my life.' Well, write your own play. Leave me alone." --Wendy Wasserstein, author of "The Heidi Chronicles," in the Hartford Courant

In spite of its Pulitzer Prize, Wendy Wasserstein's "The Heidi Chronicles," at Saddleback College's Studio Theatre, has some of the problems rampant in many current plays. "Heidi's" 11 scenes and two monologues, cinematic in their brevity and shallowness of character development, do not give a director much help in creating a dramatic through-line (as opposed to a vast historical chronology).