SOURCE: Weales, Gerald. “Prize Problems: Chronicles & Cocktail Hour.” Commonweal 116, no. 9 (5 May 1989): 279-80.

In the following review, Weales highlights the weaknesses of The Heidi Chronicles, examining the effects of its protagonist's flat characterization on the whole play.

Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles began as a workshop production at the Seattle Repertory Theatre; then, shepherded by the Seattle Rep's Daniel Sullivan, it moved to a well-received off-Broadway debut and then to Broadway; it has now been blessed by the Pulitzer Prize committee. It is a typical American-theater success story of the 1980s, but I have trouble working up much enthusiasm for its triumphant journey.

The Heidi of the title is an art historian, a presumably intelligent and sensitive woman who moves from 1965 to 1989, picking her way through the ideational thickets of those years, only to find that the goal of her generation, to become an independent woman in a male...