Setting

The Heidi Chronicles is a comedic drama that spans the years 1965 to 1989 and employs numerous locations for its setting. The play is framed by two scenes that open each of the acts. These are set in the present in a lecture hall at New York City's Columbia University where Heidi teaches. While these scenes frame and define the action, the main body of the play is told through a series of flashbacks that span Heidi's adult life.

In Act I, locales include a high school dance at Miss Crane's School in Chicago in 1965; a party for Eugene McCarthy in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1968; a church basement in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the women's group meets, in 1970; outside of the Chicago Art Institute in 1974; and the anteroom to the Pierre Hotel in New York City where Scoop has married Lisa Friedlander in 1977.

Act II takes place entirely in New...