GLOUCESTER -- What a difference a decade makes.
When I first saw Wendy Wasserstein's most acclaimed play, ``The Heidi Chronicles," in the early 1990s, it struck me as a facile series of snapshots. It still feels like snapshots, but now they're like the ones in a treasured family album.
I honestly don't know if the play has changed with the passage of time, or I have. No doubt it's both -- and no doubt Heidi Holland would know just how I feel.
Heidi is, of course, the smart, anxious art historian who's in every snapshot, from the '60s mixer through the '70s women's group to the '80s power lunch and beyond. Like her own description of her profession, Heidi is always ``a highly informed spectator"; neither a full participant nor a casual observer, she comments wryly on the tides of social change that sweep around her, even as her own life inevitably responds to their pulse.
Eric C. Engel's affectionate production for Gloucester Stage (whose artistic director, Israel Horovitz, was one of Wasserstein's early mentors) makes the most of the play's episodic structure. Anchored by Rachel Sullivan's warm, amusing work as Heidi, each scene takes on the resonance of its times. As Heidi moves through her decades, we move with her -- and, no doubt, infuse each era with our own memories of its particular inanities and joys.
For women of a certain age, just the sight of Heidi's poncho or her friend Susan's kerchief is enough to bring back our own impassioned discussions of women and feminism with friends who, like us, weren't quite sure what we meant by all that. (Kudos to Miranda Kau for that poncho, along with the shoulder-padded suits of a later time and the A-line skirts of an earlier one.) But Sullivan and Marianna Basham's chameleonic Susan have far more going for them than their outfits. Their gestures, their voices, their glances and laughs all evolve as they move through their lives, and that evolution carries us along, too.
Heidi's attraction to Scoop, the ``charismatic creep," remains a mystery (as such attractions always are, except when they're our own), but Chris Sena gives Scoop a nasal, Hoffman/Dylan drawl that perfectly conveys both his intelligent arrogance and his blind self-loathing. Ben Lambert, as best friend Peter, projects enough sweetness and charm to offset the occasional cliches in this portrayal of a gay man coming into his own. Julie Jirousek has great fun playing a couple of blithely miserable wives, and Anne Gottlieb is nothing short of wonderful in several smaller roles, especially the fulsome, burbling host of an '80s talk show.
All this takes place against giant projections of iconic images -- protest marches, Vietnam, Nixon, the Sex Pistols -- as well as the paintings on which Heidi lectures. Glaring lights from behind the screens, though, sometimes make it hard to see. And the set's bulky chairs, though they provide the necessary flexibility by folding up into tables or stools as required, are distractingly unattractive.
But that feels a little like critiquing the furniture in the pictures from a family Thanksgiving. Wasserstein, who died too young in January, may not have given us fully rounded portraits of Woman Today. Nevertheless, she gave us something we hadn't seen onstage before: sketches of real, conflicted, struggling, unexpectedly powerful women -- women, we hope, a little like us.
Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.