The Heidi Chronicles

Susan is Heidi’s oldest friend and her best female friend. She provides a contrast to Heidi because while Heidi is reserved and reluctant to change herself, Susan adopts a new persona each time she appears on stage. When the audience first meets Susan, she is eager to leave her friend alone at the dance and roll up her skirt to be appealing to a boy whose primary qualities are a resemblance to Bobby Kennedy and the ability to dance and smoke simultaneously. Susan is an intelligent, promising lawyer who clerks for the Supreme Court alongside Scoop, but she chooses to join a feminist law collective in Montana rather than leveraging her new connections into a job at a prominent law firm. At the time of Scoop’s wedding, she is considering going to business school to use what she learns to benefit the law collective, but Scoop predicts that if she does, she’ll be on Wall Street within two years. Susan is ambitious and career-driven, and her determination to get what she wants is evident from her first moment in the play. Influenced by her consciousness-raising group, Susan tries to temper her ambition with her desire to use her skills for the sake of feminism. The studio job in Los Angeles allows her to fully realize her ambitious drive, always negotiating for the most successful show, the hottest actors, and the best talent. When she accepts the job, she rationalizes that it’s better for her to take the job than someone else who might not care so much about women. In the end, Susan’s windfall comes from a television show that exploits women’s anxieties about feminism, a show that Heidi rejected. When Heidi tries to have a meaningful conversation, Susan admits that she has been so many people that she doesn’t know who she is anymore, and feminism seems to have been a phase for her, like any other aspect of coming of age. She is still civic-minded, however, as demonstrated when she uses some of the money from her show to fund a pediatric AIDS ward for Peter.

When Peter and Heidi meet at the school dance when they are 16, they immediately fit together. Peter matches Heidi’s dry, intellectual silliness, and in their goofy hyper-dramatic roleplay, Peter proposes to Heidi and then pronounces, “I want to know you all my life. If we can’t marry, let’s be great friends” (167). At first, Peter seems like the proper romantic soulmate for Heidi, the happy ending that she will finally find when she realizes that Scoop treats her terribly. To the women’s group, Heidi confesses that Peter would be much better for her, yet she keeps returning to Scoop. However, while they are both in graduate school, Peter divulges that he is gay, and he has never been on the hook waiting for Heidi to come to her senses. Peter becomes one of the most successful pediatricians in the city, and despite periods of distance and turmoil between them, Peter and Heidi remain best friends. Alongside the play’s focus on the women’s liberation movement, Peter provides a link to the gay rights movement and the rise of the AIDS crisis. As a doctor who starts a pediatric AIDS ward, Peter is in the heart of the fight, working with some of the most vulnerable victims and seeing the way society abuses and torments even children due to the stigma of the illness. Peter also represents the importance of constructing non-traditional families, as many LGBTQ+ people found that their biological families rejected them when they came out. As Heidi struggles with her attempt to “have it all” by pursuing a traditional heteronormative family structure, Peter shows her that although they can’t marry, they will always be great friends, and that is also a valid family structure.

At 19, Heidi meets Scoop Rosenbaum at a dance for volunteers working on Eugene McCarthy’s campaign for president. From the start, Scoop proudly owns his own arrogance and even insults Heidi’s sense of confidence for her willingness to stand for his insults. Scoop is a relentless career and social climber, revealing his insecurities at his wedding, when he admits that he is marrying Lisa instead of Heidi because Heidi is ambitious and might surpass him professionally. Scoop is charming and charismatic enough to hold Heidi’s attention, but he also uses his intelligence to undermine her self-worth, so that letting go of Scoop is essential in Heidi’s journey toward self-actualization. Scoop grades everything, a habit that comes off as a quirk when he first appears but reveals over time his need to quantify everything in order to assure himself that he is still winning. Scoop represents someone who has put his career and social standing above fulfilling personal relationships, and he is repeatedly unfaithful to his wife while upholding the image of the ideal family. After Scoop, Peter, and Heidi appear on Good Morning, New York, Scoop shows that he may be lonely, as the life he chose hasn’t been so fulfilling as he expected. At the end of the play, he has sold the successful magazine he started in hopes of finding something that makes him feel significant and worthwhile in politics. By that time, Heidi, with her new baby, has fully moved on from caring about his approval.

Lisa marries Scoop at the end of the first act, and Scoop admits to Heidi in a roundabout way that he chose her because he sees her as inferior to him. When Lisa meets Heidi and Peter, she says that she has always wanted children, adding, “I guess that’s pretty embarrassing” (197). Lisa’s abashed comment suggests that she feels, rightly or wrongly, alienated by the feminist movement of the 1970s because her lifelong desire to become a mother conforms to the normative gender role for women. However, while creating and caring for her family, Lisa also maintains her successful career as a well-known children’s book illustrator, even winning a prestigious award for her work. In order to do this, however, she makes the concession of turning a blind eye to Scoop’s serial infidelities. Even at their wedding, Scoop kisses Heidi and tells her that he loves her. By the end of the play, they are still married, but Scoop insinuates to Heidi that he is having another affair. Lisa sacrifices the ideal of having a respectful partner to maintain both her career and the illusion of the perfect family. 

Lisa’s younger sister, Denise, is preoccupied with the idea of her biological clock. When she first appears at Lisa’s baby shower at the beginning of Act II, she is 24 and frantic to find a partner to have children with. When she enters in the following scene, two years later, she is visibly pregnant, suggesting that she wasted no time. Denise went to Brown University, and she works as a production assistant on Hello, New York before Susan poaches her to become her assistant after Susan is hired as a film executive in Hollywood. But even when she has achieved motherhood for herself, Denise sees the other women of the baby boomer generation as miserable and remorseful for allowing their own biological clocks to run out. This infuses Denise’s perspectives on which television shows other women will find relatable, even as her boss, Susan, seems largely unconcerned with her own lack of children.