Elisabeth Moss does an excellent job portraying women in conflict. As Peggy Olson in AMC’s Mad Men, she is a woman doing a man’s job in a culture of heavy-drinking womanizers. As Heidi in Wendy Wasserstein’s Pulitzer-Prize winning play The Heidi Chronicles, she again plays a young woman torn between career and family. Moss is passionate, earnest and convincing.
Through four characters, the audience can trace the development of the Baby Boomer generation.The play begins in 1965 when Heidi meets Peter (Bryce Pinkham) at a prep school dance; the play spans 20 years of their friendship. In the next scene, she meets her on-again off-again boyfriend Scoop (a leaden, plodding Jason Biggs) at a McGovern rally. Throughout the play her best friend Susan is constantly reinventing herself and expresses the plight of the women of the time when she says, “By now I’ve been so many people, I don’t know who I am.”
Some of the references that would have once provided the play with charm, now date it, making it challenging for audience member under the age of 55. References made to artist Judy Chicago and record albums by lesser-known groups like Sam the Sham and Nelson and the Rocky Fellers may easily go over their heads.