Way Stations

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

THE HEIDI CHRONICLES

By Wendy Wasserstein

Where else would a baby boomer's memoir play begin but at a high school sock hop? The smartest girl in class sits alone, of course, equally terrified that no one will ask her to dance or that someone may. Where would the action predictably jump to next but a combined college mixer and "Clean for Gene" McCarthy rally? What way stations are then more obligatory than a protest, a consciousness-rais ing session, a TV talk show and a mistrustfully viewed "ladies' lunch"?

As a portrait of a generation, Wendy Wasserstein's new play is more documentary than drama, evoking fictionally all the right times and places but rarely attaining much thorny particularity about the people who inhabit them. The plot, such as it is, often seems like an unconscious cartoon of feminist dialectic. Two men stay close to the title character through the years: a pediatrician who is handsome, earnest, dedicated, kind, politically correct from a left-wing perspective and irreversibly gay, and a heterosexual who is grasping, impatient, domineering, shallow, as undependable as quicksilver and, for Heidi, sexually irresistible. This is the there-are-no-men lament reduced to a greeting card. The saving grace is Joan Allen in the title role. Winner of a Tony Award last year in Burn This, Allen becomes a strong contender to repeat with a performance that displays much the same virtues: an inviting vulnerability, an approach to romance simultaneously fragile and fearless, a wit at once acerbic and diffident. While Wasserstein (Isn't It Romantic?) has written mostly whiny and self-congratulatory cliches for the surrounding characters, she has given Heidi -- or Allen has found -- a complex, self-aware and poignant life.