Poor Heidi Holland. She’s got so much of what she needs – intelligence, integrity, wit, taste, a good education – that it’s a real shame she can’t find a happy ending. Or any real ending at all.

The Heidi Chronicles.

^{Photo by Adam Brick}

Wendy Wasserstein, then the favorite bard of the Baby Boom, told Heidi’s story in 1989 via the Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Heidi Chronicles.

Judging from the production now at the New Village Arts Theatre in Carlsbad, the play has grown not gracefully old, not even quaint, just insignificant. Like bathtub gin or reefer madness, the play’s central concern – repression of women – is just as potentially disastrous as ever, only it’s slipped much further down the list of problems we worry about.

The thing is, Heidi was already there in 1986. Having followed her from a hometown high school dance in 1965 through her dip into politics, her consciousness-raising feminist group sessions, her graduate school, her New York debut and her gradual success, we end up at a meeting of her girls’ school alumnae where Heidi the distinguished art historian and essayist has been asked to speak.

And all she can do is ponder her exercise class the day before, where she was surrounded by brittle,

brutal, materialistic, trivial, competitive women which left her feeling “worthless and superior” and very isolated and alone, surrounded by shards of the life that once seemed so packed with potential.

The play has two more scenes, and that’s probably two too many. Passing 40, Heidi is still childless and alone. The two great likes of her life are a tall, blonde, handsome and gay pediatrician and a hustling Jewish entrepreneur, chauvinist pig and philanderer she finds hard to resist. Those last two scenes are their individual long goodbyes.

The play’s impact at the time came from the rueful laughter at the twists and turns on the road to equality. Wasserstein makes the pitch without preaching and then lets her talent for quick and accurate sketches, her tireless name-dropping and her appetite for pop culture define both the excitement and the fallout of the era.

But Heidi herself seemed always to drift above the fray, avoiding the extremes and being true to herself. Her passion for unfairly ignored women artists illuminated the depths of a character otherwise too often tongue-tied or preoccupied. Her final loneliness is the return on her feeble investment in the life around her.

As an early report of a work still in progress, The Heidi Chronicles may still have interest. But the play will need a more accomplished production than the one staged with so few clues by Amanda Sitton at New Village Arts.

Brian Mackey as the witty and loving doctor finds the play’s mainstream muscle better than anybody else. John DeCarlo makes the cad at least interesting if not as stimulating as he is to Heidi. Chris Boxer, Kelly Iversen, Frances Regal and Sunny Smith play 15 other characters to varying degrees of competence with only Regal’s sharky TV interviewer sticking in the memory.

As Heidi, Kristianne Kurner is not only the wrong type and the wrong age but she also seems exhausted by the role. Only during the art lectures does she brighten up and persuade.

It doesn’t help that she’s stuck in the same ugly costume for all 20+ years covered in the play. If costumer Renetta Lloyd wanted to make some statement by keeping the same frocks throughout, then they needed to be nicer.

The Tim Wallace scenery is minimal with visual impact being left to Brian Townsend’s projections. These are excellent to a point, when they somehow slip out of any sequence or relevance to the passing years, surely part of the reason to include them at all.

And too bad about the music. Linda Libby is a fine singer and a more-than-adequate guitarist, but to ask that she recreate single-handedly the pop icons through the years from girl groups and Janis Joplin through the Beatles back around to Sam Cooke. Much credit to the theatre for the live music but carefully assembled snippets of recordings would have done the job better.

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