The Heidi Chronicles

Heidi describes the Flemish painter as “the greatest woman artist of the seventeenth century” (160). Peeters was a pioneer in still-life painting. She shows slides of Peeters’s undated self-portrait (c.1618), in which still-life objects surround her, and one of her so-called breakfast paintings, possibly “Still Life with Cheeses, Artichoke, and Cherries” (c.1625), based on Heidi’s description, although the text does not clarify this. Peeters was ahead of her time and influential in the development of still life as a form, but she is rarely mentioned in studies of art history.

Spencer was a highly popular American painter in her lifetime. Her early works featured warm scenes of domesticity and family, focusing particularly on the work of women, but she also branched out into portraiture, and her later works showed the less idealistic side of domestic life. Heidi shows her class “We Both Must Fade” (1869), which depicts a young woman in an ornate dress, surrounded by objects that symbolize the impermanence of life and youth. The painting evokes Heidi’s memory of the school dance represented in Scene 1. Note: In the text of the play, the artist’s name is spelled “Lily,” but outside sources spell her name “Lilly.”

The song, released as a hit single by Betty Everett in 1964, plays at Susan and Heidi’s high school dance in Act I, Scene 1. It’s sung from the perspective of one woman who is trying to explain to another how to tell if a man really loves her, insisting that the only way to tell is by the way he kisses her. This is significant, because Heidi will meet Peter, who will seem to be a perfect romantic match but won’t kiss her. Then, she will meet Scoop, who will kiss her to seduce her and will then kiss her again at his wedding. Although his passionate kisses suggest that he does love her, they are ultimately disappointing, since they aren’t enough to lead him to commit to a woman whose vision for her life doesn’t match his traditional expectations or sufficiently boost his ego.

This song plays just as the deejay announces that the next dance is “Ladies’ Choice” (164), and although Susan rushes off eagerly to ask her twisting smoker—whom she later mentions was her boyfriend for a while—she will spend the rest of the play trying to find satisfaction through romance or career but never quite achieving it.

After Susan leaves, the song shifts as Peter approaches. In “Play with Fire,” the singer warns the subject—a wealthy, sheltered, privileged girl—that he is dangerous, and she’d be safer going home to her mother. Like the voice of the song, Peter is mysterious, and, ultimately, falling in love with him would be dangerous, as it would lead to heartache. However, the music changes back to “The Shoop Shoop Song” before they dance, foreshadowing that they will never have the romantic love that would be revealed by “his kiss” because he doesn’t kiss her at all.

At the dance, Heidi draws Peter’s attention because instead of participating, she is reading Death Be Not Proud, a memoir written by John Gunther, an American journalist. It accounts Gunther’s experience of his son Johnny’s diagnosis of a brain tumor, his declining health, and his death at the age of 17. The choice to read during a high school dance—and to read this book in particular— signifies Heidi’s rebellion against the frivolity and lightheartedness of the dance and against the expectation that she should be light and agreeable to attract a boy.

This song, recorded by Big Brother & the Holding Company, with Janis Joplin on lead vocals, is playing when Heidi meets Scoop at the dance for Eugene McCarthy volunteers. It’s a love song about heartbreak, narrated from the perspective of a woman who gives a man everything she can, but, in return, he takes pieces of her heart, one by one. This foreshadows the relationship between Heidi and Scoop. Their conversation insinuates that Heidi is a virgin until their encounter. During the era (and, for many sectors of society, after that period as well), virginity was culturally framed as a significant personal sacrifice for a woman, one that Scoop takes without giving Heidi the love and respect she wants from him.

Scoop references Albers’s series of over 2,000 paintings, each of which consists of four painted squares, stacked in layers—although, notably, Scoop says three instead of four—to undermine Heidi’s expertise as a trained art historian. Scoop consistently condescends to Heidi throughout the scene, flashing his intellect to try to make her feel inferior.

“White Rabbit,” which starts to play as Scoop kisses Heidi for the first time, is about the mind-altering experience of psychedelic drugs. Although Scoop and Heidi don’t consume any intoxicating substances, her first experience of kissing and having sex with Scoop (which is presumably also her first sexual experience) changes her by making her fall for him. Heidi is intoxicated by this feeling throughout her relationship with the non-committal Scoop, which leads her to compromise her own intimacy needs for the sake of his limited attention.

Franklin’s anthem to women—especially Black women—about loving themselves and demanding respect from their partners opens and closes the women’s consciousness-raising collective meeting. The song illustrates the feminist message that Heidi comes to terms with during the meeting, which is that Scoop isn’t respecting her, and she needs to stop settling for it.

The MC at Scoop’s wedding announces “You Send Me” as Scoop and Lisa’s favorite song, although Scoop ends up dancing with Heidi rather than returning to the reception to dance with his new wife as he was supposed to do. The lyrics are simple and romantic, with one person telling another about the way their love makes them feel. At the time of Scoop’s wedding, the song is 20 years old, and it’s musically old-fashioned. Much like the structure of Scoop’s marriage, it recalls the traditional conservatism of the 1950s. At the end of the play, Heidi sings it to her adopted daughter, reframing the essentialized expectation of romantic love into maternal love, which she achieves through non-traditional means.

Perry was an American Impressionist painter who trained with Claude Monet and was influential in bringing French Impressionism to the United States. She has been largely overlooked in art history, despite her significant contributions, and later in the play, Heidi mentions that she has received a grant to present an exhibit of Perry’s paintings. Heidi shows her class slides of “Lady with a Bowl of Violets” (1910) and “Lady in Evening Dress” (1911), although she prefers the latter because it commits more fully to the impressionistic style, as Perry is “willing to lose her edges in favor of paint and light” (206). The women featured in both paintings seem to be observing, removed from what is happening as they watch, which Heidi describes as “uniquely female” (206)

Amid her lecture on Lilla Cabot Perry, Heidi’s teaching assistant accidentally inserts a slide of this 17th-century painting. The dark color, heavy shadows, and brutality of the subject matter offer a stark (and humorous) contrast to Perry’s impressionistic work, providing a quick glimpse of a woman who is not an observer at all, but a hero who saves the Jewish people by using her beauty to trick an enemy general into inviting her into his tent, where she gets him drunk and executes him after he passes out. This moment suggests that beneath the surface of a woman who appears to be complying with the pressure to look and act according to social norms, there may be a Judith who emerges as an avenging warrior. 

John Lennon’s anthem to a utopian world is significant at this moment in the play because it’s 1980, and Lennon has just been shot and killed. Heidi arrives after going to Central Park, where Yoko Ono, his widow, held a vigil attended by 100,000 people. Lennon—the subject of many fan crushes—and Ono represent an idealized romantic love, one that he claimed to have chosen over his career with the Beatles, asserting in a Rolling Stones interview, “I had to either be married to them or Yoko, and I chose Yoko, and I was right.” Although the band was already on its way to dissolution by that point, this love story became mythologized as a force that was more important than fame and fortune. Lennon’s death tragically ended their relationship and his potential, and in the play, it serves as a sobering reminder that marriages, and life itself, will fade and end.

One of the most beloved children’s books of all time, Heidi is about a young orphaned girl who moves to the mountains to live with her bitter, reclusive grandfather, whom she loves, but who won’t send her to school. Her aunt takes her away to be a hired companion for a young girl who uses a wheelchair, and they become close friends. Heidi gets homesick and returns to the mountains, and her friend visits and becomes strong enough to walk. Heidi’s persistent warmth and cheerfulness affect everyone she meets. As Peter tells Heidi in the play, the two volumes of the story are “Heidi’s year of travel and learning” and “Heidi uses what she knows” (236). The two decades of the play represent Heidi Holland’s years of travel and learning, and she uses what she knows when she decides that having platonic friends and adopting a child are a fulfilling way to create a family.