The Heidi Chronicles

Wendy Wasserstein’s play The Heidi Chronicles first opened Off-Broadway with Playwrights Horizons in 1988, transferring to Broadway for a successful run in 1989. The play follows Heidi Holland from the ages of 16 to 40 as she explores her desires for her own life, inspired by the liberation of feminism, but tempered by gendered expectations in a patriarchal society. Critics celebrated the play for introducing feminism into mainstream theater.

Wasserstein wrote 11 plays, and The Heidi Chronicles is her most well-known work, winning the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Broadway Play, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play, the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Play, the Tony Award for Best Play, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, all in 1989. Although Wasserstein died of lymphoma in 2006 at age 55, she remains a significant voice in American theater, particularly for her ability to speak to the experience of being a woman throughout the changing ethos of the women’s liberation movement and its evolution in the subsequent decades. In 1995, The Heidi Chronicles was adapted into a television movie starring Jamie Lee Curtis. A 2015 Broadway revival of the play starred Elisabeth Moss.