Strong Cast Adds Topping To Excellent Script

“The Heidi Chronicles” is the most famous play to emerge from the contemporary American feminist movement. With Jamie Curtis smoothly handling the title role of art historian Heidi Holland, it is winningly presented tonight on cable television.

The telemovie that begins at 5 p.m. on TNT is essentially unchanged from the Broadway stage version that won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize. No surprise there, since Wendy Wasserstein wrote both.

Curtis is superb. She is ably supported by Peter Friedman as Scoop Rosenbaum, Heidi’s longtime lover; Kim Cattrall as Susan Johnson, Heidi’s best female friend, and Tom Hulce as Peter Patrone, Heidi’s best male friend, who is gay. This is a strong cast expertly executing an excellent script.

The story begins with Heidi at a high school dance in 1965 and concludes with her as a successful scholar and author in 1989. The central question embedded in her “Chronicles” is a familiar one, though seldom framed so artfully as here: Can the feminist Heidi have it all?

Well, she didn’t manage to get Eugene McCarthy elected president in 1968. But she did make love happily for the first time that year, with Peter in the Pine Cone Motel in Manchester, N.H., while they were both campaigning there for the Minnesota senator. One outta two ain’t bad.

In 1970 at a feminist meeting in Ann Arbor, Mich., Heidi enlists in the movement. Three years later, she is leading a demonstration against an art exhibition that includes no female painters. In these two scenes, as in all others reflecting on cultural concerns of the last 30 years or so, Wasserstein’s ear for the tone of the times is unerring.

For Heidi, the handsome and smooth-talking Scoop becomes The Man Who Got Away. In 1977, when he marries children’s book author Lisa Friedlander (Eve Gordon), he tells her why:

“Let’s say we married and I asked you to devote the, say, next 10 years of your life to me. To making me a home and a family and a life so secure that I could with some confidence go out into the world each day and attempt to get an A. You’d say no. You’d say, ‘Why can’t we be partners? Why can’t we both go out in the world and get an A?

“Then you’d be competing with me. On a scale from one to 10, if you aim for six and get six, everything will work out nicely. But if you aim for 10 in all things and get six, you’re going to be very disappointed. And unfortunately, that’s why you ‘quality time’ girls are going to be one generation of disappointed women. Interesting, exemplary, even sexy, but basically unhappy. The ones who open doors usually are.”

By 1980, still shooting for a 10 in life, Heidi has become the accomplished author of “And the Light Floods in From the Left: Essays on Art and Women,” and she is teaching at Columbia University. Comfortably settling for a six, Peter has become the prosperous publisher of a magazine for yuppies called Boomer.

The economy of dialogue and precision of characterization with which Wasserstein mounts set-piece scenes make manifest why she deserved her Pulitzer. Particularly good is an appearance by Heidi, Scoop, and prominent pediatrician Peter on a talk show hosted by April Lambert (Shari Belafonte). The men do all the talking while Heidi can’t get a full sentence in edgewise.

Another good one occurs in 1984, with Susan now cutting a swath through Hollywood as a TV producer.

In her office at It’s a Girl Productions, she and her story editor, Denise (Debra Eisenstadt), vainly try to persuade Heidi to help them create a sitcom about “a way-out painter, an uptight curator and a dilettante heiress.”

The tactless young Denise tells Heidi, “A lot of women your age are very unhappy, unfulfilled, frightened of growing old alone.”

Speaking for her generation, Heidi says, “I don’t think we made such big mistakes. And I don’t want to see three (sitcom) girls on the town who do.”

Nevertheless, a certain sadness suffuses Heidi as she matures.

Unfortunately, the one weak scene in “The Heidi Chronicles” comes in 1986 when she attempts to explain her predicament in a speech to other former students at her high school. Practically the only clear sentence in this muddled oration is her saying, “I’m just not happy, and I’m afraid I haven’t been happy for some time.”

But perhaps it is asking too much for Wasserstein to explain every problem Heidi encounters. The feminist movement itself seems to be in something of a muddle lately, uncertain of what lines of march to follow through the waning years of this century.

If the movement’s thought leaders are themselves in quandary, has anyone the right to demand that a playwright make everything clear? Nobody ever asked Shakespeare to cure all the ills of Elizabethan society.