Heidi in the House -- One Day Only! The First Coronavirus-Age Triumph

TEETH TOGETHER, LIPS APART Original Broadway stars of Wendy Wasserstein’s “The Heidi Chronicles” got together again at the play’s revival in 2015. From left, Peter Friedman, Joan Allen and Boyd Gaines.

THE FIRST TIME I SAW “The Heidi Chronicles,” it was truly the old days. My friends and I had pre-theater dinner at Le Madeleine, which was one of my favorite places, on 43rd and 9th. (Within a year and a half, both those friends would be dead of AIDS.) Wendy Wasserstein, the playwright, had won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for drama for this play, which had begun Off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons.

Heidi, an art historian who made the mistake (or had the blessing) of being a true believer in the feminist movement, was played by Joan Allen, a girl of 33. (Apologies to the writers of “Sex and the City.”) Her on-again, off-again, never-enlightened-enough love interest, Scoop, was played by Peter Friedman. And her best gay friend, Peter, who becomes a pediatrician brokenhearted by treating children with AIDS, was Boyd Gaines.

CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISING 101 A scene from the 1989 Broadway production of “The Heidi Chronicles.” From left, Cynthia Nixon, Joanne Camp, Anne Lange, Joan Allen and Ellen Stewart.

The last time I saw “The Heidi Chronicles” was last month on my laptop screen. And there were Joan and Peter and Boyd again, a little grayer, a little less dewy, but absolutely convincing as their idealistic, evolving characters, even when playing privileged Northeastern college students during Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign in 1968.

It was the Plays in the House live streaming of Wasserstein’s masterpiece, and remarkably the format worked. My first thought was that this laugh-filled drama was even better than I had remembered, even funnier, even more on target. At a casual party, one character approaches the snack table and asks, “Are you guarding the chips?” The other character replies: “No. I trust them.”

(The 2015 revival of “Heidi,” which starred Elisabeth Moss, did not make such a good case for the play. For some reason, the same actress who captured the awakening soul of a 1950s ad agency secretary who learns she can write and be a full human being didn’t seem to connect with the feminist mentality of 1968-88.

HEIDI & SCOOP Allen and Friedman in the 1989 production. They married (IRL) in 1990 and divorced in 2002.

My second thought was that there were real benefits to this live-streaming format. Someone else will have to analyze where the guidelines for stream-acting falls between acting onstage and acting for the movie camera, but the experience did — as one commenter observed early on — feel like being in the front row.

And the actors’ heads being inside separate on-screen boxes didn’t appear to hinder the emotional connections between characters. In fact, it made it easier to observe and appreciate the “reacting” aspect of the art. Cynthia Nixon, who played multiple supporting characters, was particularly fascinating as a very young consciousness-raising-group participant, who is hearing a lot of the other women’s feminist theories for the first time.

The “reading” began at 2 p.m. on a Wednesday, because why tamper with traditional matinee timing? Shortly after 3, there was a technical glitch. (We learned later that Allen’s internet connection had gone out. While that was tended to, Friedman ad-libbed and the show’s hosts interviewed him, to kill time.)

And then the show, as it must, went on. We saw Heidi appear on a television talk show and be overshadowed by vehement mansplaining (Scoop and Peter are the other two guests). We saw her offered a network series job by an old friend, Susan, who now says, “Blaming everything on being a woman is just passé.” We saw her admit, at the end of delivering an art lecture at the Plaza Hotel, “I haven’t been happy for a long time.” We saw her take action and find at least a tentative peace.

And then it was gone. For rights and permissions reasons (we think), Plays in the House does not record these full-script readings for later playback. It happened once. You were there. It was over. Just like real theater.