I Should've Brought Tissues: Wendy Wasserstein's Former Typist Reflects on THE HEIDI CHRONICLES

I Should've Brought Tissues

In retrospect, it was stupid of me not to bring tissues.  I can't guarantee that you'll have the profoundly cathartic experience I did at the revival of The Heidi Chronicles on Broadway, since you probably didn't have a day job as Wendy Wasserstein's typist for the last five years of her life.  But it would really be a pity for you to miss this A-class production of this brilliant play.  Do yourself a favor and go.  It's special.  And Pam MacKinnon's direction is firm, clear, specific and light-handed: exactly the touch that Wendy's plays need.

Heidi starts funny and light and a bit odd.  And it does feel dated at first, and not just because the first scene is set in the late '60s.  But the amazing thing about theater is that it acts like a time machine: we, today, have a perspective on the '60s, '70s and '80s, just as the audience did that first watched Heidi in 1988.  It might not be the same perspective as that original audience, but the play educates and triangulates now much in the way it did then, I imagine.


When I directed Blithe Spirit at Syracuse Stage last year, I begged Tim Bond, the artistic director, to let me cut it.  But he insisted against it.  The entertainer in me (the one who learned from Wendy, ironically enough) knew the show could stand to lose around 20 minutes of repetition.  But on opening night, the purist in me loved that our audience listened to the exact same words spoken in the exact same order as its original 1945 audience did.  Theater doesn't just teach about history in content: it does so by form.  Blithe Spirit teaches me about what 1945 audiences enjoyed, just as Heidi teaches me what a late '80s audience had to learn watching a piece that spanned the last thirty years.



Content Over Form

Although the character Heidi certainly has moments of pro-activity, of temper flaring and ego clashing, I think it would be hard to name a more passive protagonist.  Throughout the play, her scene partners (the gay best friend Peter, her on-again/off-again boyfriend Scoop, and her perpetually re-inventing best friend Susan) bulldoze her.  If I stumbled upon an individual scene from this play say, in scene study class, I think I'd be surprised to learn that Heidi is the lead.

Her famous soliloquy breakdown, in the third-to-last scene of the play, is really the breakdown that she's been building up to her entire life.  But in truth, we see that Heidi can only be the active, have a monologue (let alone a breakdown) when she is the only person on stage.  She is a character so used to defining herself as an outsider and as a passive that the only way for her to find the space she needs is for her to be alone.  Without a scene partner.  Isolation is the price of expression.

As a writing feat, it's an incredible thing, to successfully build a story around a passive protagonist.  As a response to the feminist movement, it's an even more astonishing.  Although the play makes it clear when Scoop and Peter bulldoze Heidi on a TV Studio Set (II/2) that men are often the guilty parties here, Susan (who's really Scoop's alter ego) is equally guilty of the same crime in the restaurant one scene later.

 We Both Must Fade

I know that Wendy has a reputation as a boulevard comedienne.  But few writers of that genre crafted plays that spanned 25 years.  I met Wendy on Old Money, generally considered her least successful play, but one that also showed Wendy's desire to experiment with form (it jumped back and forth 80 years over the course of a dinner party thrown in a robber baron mansion on the Upper East Side).  And I can't help but wonder what other experiments in form Wendy might've attempted had she been with us longer.  At least, I hope this production ushers in a Wasserstein Renaissance, full of productions that embrace the possibilities of her texts.

A Story About A Woman Who Got Sad

Wendy once said to me, in that wonderful funny/serious/joking/not-joking way she had, that Heidi was a play about a woman who got sad.  But as someone who'll be turning 40 next year, I feel like I truly relate to Heidi's alienation in a way that I hadn't before.  Yes, it's a story about a woman.  But its universality lies in the profound 40-something sadness you feel when your friends abandon you for their kids and the suburbs, for their partners or professions, to other cities and states and countries.  I recently removed three friends whom I've known for over twenty years from my speed dial because we didn't communicate enough to keep them there for even nostalgic reasons.  I don't know what I would do without the guys I met on the Ramblers soccer team, guys on average 10 years my junior, who haven't yet reached that point in their life that they withdraw.  And that's the story of Heidi: the story of a woman who is about to withdraw in response to the world that has already withdrawn around her, but who finally decides that she can't. 

This post would be remiss without two more things:

First, Bryce Pinkham's performance is, well - this is why we go to the theater, folks.  He'd start talking and I'd start crying.  His scenes with Heidi were sharp, heart-breaking, moving, real.  I've seen him on stage three times in the last two years and each time I feel like he's the best that we've got.  If you know him, tell him I'm a fan.  He's pitch-perfect.

Second, the story of how I scored these tix:  My friends Amy Danis and Mark Johannes, who are MARS Theatricals, were having lunch with Susan Gallin, one of the lead producers of Heidi.  They told her about me.  Then she emailed me and offered me comps.  This is exactly the kind of elegant, classy, random-act-of-kindness thing Wendy herself would've done.  Of course, I was going to find a way to see this show, but it probably would've been from the balcony, and it definitely would've set me back at least one hundred bucks I certainly don't have right now (two hundred to take Rafael, who said, "This is one of the best plays I've ever seen in my life.").  So thanks Amy, Mark and most of all Susan.

And of course, Wendy.  I hear that cackle of your laugh as distinctly as ever.  Especially in the theater.

Blog Hop

Author Blog Hop

Elise Forier Edie

I got invited to do this author blog hop thing and since I haven't posted in (who even knows how long) and because I like the author who invited me to do it so much, I said yes.

Elise Forier Edie wrote the book and co-wrote the lyrics to the ah-mazing musical Rebel Girls, inspired by the Bread and Roses Strike of 1912 in Lawrence, MA.  I was match-made with Elise and the show's composer, Tina Lear, to direct a workshop of their musical.  They were awesome.  With the help of lots of index cards and yummy snacks, we holed ourselves into the CAP 21 conference room and re-organized the entire show in a day.  They trusted me, I loved the material, and we had one helluva time.  Apparently, Elise even blogged about how great our experience was.

So when Elise invited me, I took Bob Moss's advice: say yes.  I said yes.  Here are the answers to my questions, and at the end of this post, you'll find Elise's info, along with the info of three other fab writers whom I invited to participate in this thing.

1)  What am I working on?

My first book, One Man Guy, is being published in May (Macmillan, FSG).  It’s about Alek, a fourteen-year old Armenian boy who falls for New York City, the music of Rufus Wainwright and a totally hot skater boy over the course of one epic summer.

I’ve been working on my second book, The Aether Wild, for a few years.  It’s a collaboration with two friends, Suzanne Agins and Rosemary Andress, who are both primarily theater directors like me.  How many directors does it take to write a book?  Three, apparently.  The Aether Wild is a science fiction/fantasy post-apocalyptic adventure story about a girl determined to save the world at all costs.

My day job, as day jobs go, is as a theater director.  I’m currently in rehearsals for aproduction of Spring Awakening (themusical) in Syracuse, and am in pre-production for my next production with TheUpstart Creatures, a company of theater artists I assembled last year.

Other projects include adapting Paradise Lost for the stage and a commission from the Sloan Foundation, which I’m using to write a play about Lucretius, the Ancient Roman scientist/philosopher who wrote De Rerum Natura, which translates into something like: The Way Things Are, The Nature of the Universe  or The Nature of Things.   

2)  How does my work differ from others of its genre?

To be honest, I haven’t read many coming out stories, so I’m not exactly sure what the norm is.  Going by the feedback I’ve been getting from Goodreads, it seems like most coming out novels fall on the angsty side.  I came out when I was twenty-one (and not to my parents until I was twenty-three) and I remember how incredibly anxiety-making it was.  I was not, however, especially interested in writing that because my parents, like the parents of most people I know, accepted my coming out with great love.  I’m not saying it wasn’t awkward, or that other people’s coming out isn’t more traumatic.  I just felt like we’d seen and read that story plenty, given how the times are a-changin’, I wanted to write a story in which the coming out wasn’t the big deal event.

3)  Why do I write what I do?

Wendy Wasserstein

For most of my life, writing was like going to loud bars: I knew lots of people who appeared to enjoy it, but it never occurred to me that it was something I myself would like.   Then Wendy Wasserstein died and I missed her, and writing was an activity that I associated with her, having been her typists for five years.  So I started writing as a way of remembering Wendy.

When I write a play or book, it’s because I can’t not write it.  Something about the story demands to be told.  I have one such story bubbling inside of me.  I don’t want to write it, in that I’ve very busy now and over-committed and don’t really have time, but it is insisting on being told and so soon, I imagine, I will start typing.

On a more conscious level, I try to write stories that I don’t think have been told (or told enough) yet.  Many readers of One Man Guy learned about the existence of the Armenian genocide through the book, and the idea that I can help tell that story feels incredibly important to me.

4)  How does my writing process work?

When I’m dealing with the frightful proposition of a blank screen, I need to write early, before my husband wakes up, when I’m barely conscious, when I can’t filter or even think about what I’m writing.  I usually have a sense of what I’m going to write (I outline and research heavily before I begin), but I do my best first-draft writing first thing in the morning.

Then I’ll try to do something that has nothing to do with writing – I’ll go to my yoga studio or do some cooking, take a bike ride.  I’ll revisit the pages in the afternoon, and often be totally surprised at the words I’m reading, as if someone else wrote them.  I find that’s the best way to look at my own work.

When it comes to re-writing, I’m better at that in the afternoon.  I like to work a little, take a nap, work some more.  I prefer to do that at tables, rather than desks, because tables are bigger and I like to spread out.  Or, if I just need to read, I like to do that lying down on a sofa, because then when I want to take a nap I don’t need to move.


The Writer Who Invited Me To Join The Blog Hop

BLOG: http://www.eliseforieredie.com/blog.htm

TWITTER: @EliseForierEdie

FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/EliseForierEdie?ref=hl

BIO: http://www.eliseforieredie.com/bio.htm

GOODREADS: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7495615.Elise_Forier_Edie

AMAZON: http://www.amazon.com/Elise-Forier-Edie/e/B00HFEFOGE/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1

The Writers Whom I Invited To Join The Blog Hop (all Vassar Grads, oddly enough)

Amy Boyce Holtcamp - was my muse in college, the lead of just about every play I directed.  She continued to go to UW to study directing, and now lives in the sexiest city in the country, New Orleans, with her rock star-dramaturg husband Victor who teaches at Tulane and often proofs my blog out of the kindness of his OCD heart.  Amy is one of my favorite collaborators, a great writer and director. 

Mary Beth Caschetta and I met at the memorial service for Ann Imbrie, who had taught us both at Vassar a decade apart.  Ann had mentioned Mary Beth regularly, and by the time I met her I felt like I had already known her.  Being able to share the loss of Ann with someone else who had known and loved her was incredibly valuable to me, and I love how Mary Beth writes about painful things directly and unsentimentally.

Isaac Butler, on the other hand, got to Vassar the year after I left, and we met at Soho Rep, where he assisted me one summer producing a festival of new plays.  Like me and Amy, he's a director and writer, and without a doubt the most well-read and well-watched guy out there. 

7 Years of Missing Wendy

"I like him.  He knows when to laugh."

These were the first words Wendy Wasserstein ever spoke to me.  Or rather, about me, I should say.  We had just finished the first day of a week-long workshop of her play Old Money at Lincoln Center in May of 2000, in preparation for the upcoming production that would go into rehearsals in October of the same year.  The ever-kind Mark Brokaw had asked me to assist him on the production, and invited me to sit in on the workshop, and at the end of the first day, after the actors left and I lingered, hoping I'd be allowed to stay and hear how Wendy and Mark talked about what they'd learn from having heard the play, Wendy gestured to me and said those words.  "I like him," she giggled, in that endearing way that made you feel included.  "He knows when to laugh."

The First Laugh

Knowing when to laugh was a matter of great import to Wendy.  When I worked for her over the course of the next few years, the first first laugh was something she'd talk about.  For her, the first laugh was to a comedy what the first song was to a musical - if it didn't come early enough and wasn't pitch-perfect, you'd lose the chance to introduce your audience to the piece.

After Old Money opened, Wendy asked me to type for her.  I was her amanuensis, I guess, although I only learned that word recently, in the context of Milton, who was blind when he "wrote" Paradise Lost.  The poem was transcribed by his daughters, to whom he recited it in its entirety.  I imagine them furiously scribbling down his lines of perfect iambic pentameter, secretly bemoaning their cruel lot in life to each other later.  "If only we weren't the daughters of a brilliant blind poet," Anne Milton, the elder, would complain to Mary, the younger.  "We could go out on Saturday nights like the rest of the Puritan girls.  But instead we're stuck home scribbling away.  And don't even get me started on my ink-stained fingers.  Who's ever going to want to slip a ring on one of these?"

The one on the left looks especially bored to me - she's totally thinking "Dad's blind, so he can't see me rolling my eyes at him." Milton also had a third daughter, standing in the back, but she's rarely mentioned so she must've been boring.

A Life In The Theater

I'm not sure exactly what I'd be doing today if I hadn't met Wendy.  Unlike many of my peers, I live on the money I make directing and writing.  In my twenties, when the income I made from directing was the meagerest of trickles, working for Wendy was the only way I could afford to pay my rent and buy my groceries and go out dancing.  In addition, my first professional directing job was at Theater J in Washington, D.C. - two one-acts Wendy had written and given to the little theater to produce if and only if I got to direct them.  The first was called Welcome To My Rash, a piece that's almost unbearably painful for me to look at now, about a sick, middle-aged writer struggling with her illness and loneliness.  The second was a one-act version of Third, which would grow up and become Wendy's last full-length play.

I am not resilient the way many of my friends are, and I think working a day-job would've broken me.  But I didn't need a day-job, because I had Wendy.  When I would kvetch to her about how unfair it was that young directors with trust funds could stay in New York and assist for free while I had to go gallivanting around the country directing at colleges, she would tell me that she was my trust fund, and I would remember how lucky I was to be able to support myself in a job that paid well, didn't require early mornings, and allowed me to learn about my field.

Writing

Up until and including the time that I worked for Wendy, I never wanted to write.  I know this, because I didn't write anything, and I'm someone who believes that people do what they want to do.  I haven't actually parsed through the cause-and-effect of losing Wendy and starting to write.  Was it something that would've happened if she hadn't passed away, because my proximity to her inspired it, like the Fantastic Four, who developed their superpowers after being exposed to cosmic rays (not to be confused, of course, with the gamma rays that turned Bruce Banner into the Incredible Hulk)?

One of the first things I ever wrote was a play about a young director and the established writer he works for, titled WORK.  I've been hacking away at it for years (click here to go to my website and download the sample).  I have no idea if the play will ever have any life, but I know that writing it helped me tremendously as I struggled with Wendy's loss the ache of missing her.  So maybe losing Wendy was the cause, and writing the effect.  I am positive that I'd never have had the fortitude to write my young adult novel, ONE MAN GUY, if it hadn't been for the years I spent at Wendy's side.

Or sometimes I think, Wendy died so young, and with so many things she still wanted to write, that I started writing to try to fill the void her absence created.  Chekhov, after all, wrote hundreds of short stories and 5 brilliant plays before he died at the age of 44.  Sometimes, when I want to depress myself, I think about all the work he would've made if he had lived to be 50, or 60 or 70.  It's enough reason for everyone to pick up a pen and start writing their version of funny, sad, heart-breaking characters on a Russian estate.

Closer Than Ever

Writing makes me feel close to Wendy.  Unlike directing, with which I've had mentors galore, Wendy is the only one of two writers I've ever really been close to in that way, and so the act of it reminds me of her.  Writing my play about her, this blog, my young adult novel - every time I sit down at the keyboard, I hear her voice, and most of the time, it's making me laugh.  The rest of the time, it's giving me advice, which is inevitably practical.  When she came to see my production of The Seagull, she told me how much the character of Trigorin spoke to her, in his obsession with his writing, and how he (and Chekhov) were clearly so interested in the craft of the art.  Wendy took great pride in that, in her own work.  And I know that some people feel her plays are a little old-fashioned, and not edgy enough, or too nice, and until I get to direct one again and prove those people wrong, I hope we can all agree that they are, at least, written by someone who brings great craft to her field.



Pastrami and Cheesecake








October 18th was Wendy's birthday.  We had plans to lunch together on the day that neither one of us knew would be her last birthday, in 2005.  We were supposed to meet at the little writing studio she kept on 60th St (in the same building where Rafael was living when I met him, and if you think that wasn't Wendy nudging me along from beyond, you gravely underestimate her).  Wendy wasn't feeling well enough, however, to leave her apartment, so I went to the Carnegie Deli and picked up pastrami sandwiches and cheesecake, one of our perennial favorites.

She was in bed, where I served her the delicious fare.  She picked at her sandwich and didn't even touch the cheesecake.  If I weren't in such deep denial about her medical state, this would've been a clear sign that something was wrong.  I ate my portion with gusto, blabbering on about boys and work.

I try to do something that would honor Wendy ever January 30th.  Before her niece Samantha moved out West, we'd sometimes meet for a cocktail at Cafe des Artistes, which like Wendy, is no longer with us.  The first anniversary of Wendy's death, I went to see Sarah Ruhl's stunningly beautiful play The Clean House at Lincoln Center, in the same theater where Old Money had happened years before.  I wept through most of The Clean House and left the theater knowing that I would direct the play one day (which I got to do at Syracuse Stage two years ago, one of my finest productions).

But the one thing I always do January 30th is go to the Carnegie and order a pastrami sandwich and a slice of cheesecake.  I am passed the age where I can finish both those magnificent servings by myself, but I still do it, knowing I'll have leftovers for another meal.  And so I invite you to partake of this tradition, wherever you are today.  Order some pastrami or a slice of cheesecake, and spend a moment thinking about Wendy, and how lucky those of us who knew her were to have known her, and how lucky all of us are to have her work.