An American Daughter

When I saw Wendy Wasserstein’s seminal play The Heidi Chronicles 11 years ago, I left the theater feeling something I hadn’t felt in a long time – seen. A newly single 31-year-old working on an all-male team, I couldn’t stop thinking of Heidi (beautifully performed by Elisabeth Moss) a successful art historian, attending a friend’s baby shower and standing at an awkward distance from her friends, unsure of what to say. Her discomfort was relatable.

Wasserstein, whose writing probed the eternal question of whether women can “have it all”, posed similar questions in her play An American Daughter. But while The Heidi Chronicles floated those questions within a moving personal story, in An American they fall to the floor with a heavy thud.

Produced by La Femme Theatre, dedicated to exploring the female experience through plays,An American Daughterarrives Off-Broadway at the Pershing Square Signature Center. This production offers a brand-new draft of Wasserstein’s play, culled from Wasserstein’s revisions and the script of a TV adaptation. An American Daughter first ran on Broadway in 1997. While timely then, it is undeniably dated now.

Directed by Sarna Lapine, An American Daughter offers a slice of now-dated Americanadrawn heavily from the Clinton administration.While clearly intended to inspire nostalgia from the audience, it instead evokes distracting thoughts about our current administration. While this critic deeply appreciates political theater, the parallels make it impossible to lose oneself in the production.

Wasserstein’s play follows Lissa Hughes (played by Jean Lichty, La Femme’s founder), a successful doctor whose nomination for Surgeon General is considered a safe, bipartisan selection. The daughter of the established Senator Alan (Dakin Matthews),Lissa also happens to be a fifth-generation descendant of Ulysses S. Grant. A liberal devoted to progress in women’s health, she is married to Walter (Robert Sean Leonard), a professor suffering an inconveniently timed mid-life crisis – one that perhaps motivates him to sabotage his wife’s nomination when he reveals to a reporter that Lissa once forgot to report to jury duty.

When Lissy and Walter’s friend, conservative writer Morrow McCarthy (Ryan Spahn) learns of Lissa’s secret, as does the TV personality Timber Tucker (Chris Ghaffari), a media firestorm erupts, fanned by Lissy’s description of her late mother as a woman who “was the kind of ordinary Indiana housewife who took pride in her icebox cakes and cheese pimento canapes” and lacked “a sense of adventure.”

In a scene eerily foreshadowing of the present day - albeit with print newspapers instead of screens – Walter (perhaps a little too eagerly) informs Lisaof the fury of Middle-American voters who perceived her comments as uppity, liberal, condescending and alienating. (If soy milk was the norm at the time, I’m fairly confident the script would include a remark about lattes.)

It’s impossible to watch An American Daughter without thinking of Zoe Baird, an attorney general nominee who hired an undocumented immigrant as her nanny and did not pay her Social Security taxes. But the real ghost haunting this production is Hillary Clinton and her infamous 1992 remark, “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life.” The similarities to Clinton don’t end there – a headband plays a pivotal role in the play’s second act.

Equally futile is watching this play without thinking of Clinton’s 2016 loss to Donald Trump and what might have been. The current state of the Washington, thanks to President Trump, is so far removed from the Washington in this play, that it’s difficult to relate to Lissy and her circle. Further weighing the productionis Lichty’s performance as Lissy. She plods through the play delivering her lines in a flat, pedantictone, at times hardly reacting to the absurdity of her situation or giving justiceto Wasserstein’s clever dialogue.

What could have been powerfully movingscenes between Lissy and Walter as they navigate the complicated dynamics of their marriage, both in and outside their home, feel empty. Leonard conveys Walter’s confusion with his place in the world, but his introspection seems immature rather than sympathetic. And when Lissy finally speak her mind, Lichty’s outburst sounds rehearsed rather than impassioned.

Her performance drags down the supporting cast, including the always radiant Montego Glover as Judith, Lissy’s friend and fellow doctor who is struggling to conceive.As Quincy Quince, a gender studies writerCarmen Ziles adeptly conveys her character’s calculating ambition, but the character lacks any other defining characteristics. Ghaffari depicts the sleek polish of Timber Tucker, and Spahn does what he can with the vague character of Morrow McCarthy, but his character is underwritten and his motivations lack any clarity. Matthews is clearly the most comfortable of the ensemble as the verbose Senator, along with the always outstanding Mary Beth Peil as his latest wife, the explicably nicknamed Chubby. The farthest removed from the political scene, she also is the happiest of the group.

Wasserstein did not consider An American Daughter finished, and it’s equally impossible to wonder what might have been had she lived longer and continued writing. Her compassionate wit and piercing insight would be a welcome voice in America today.