Intermediality and Theatre: Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles

Abstract

An American dramatist, availing herself of a sound design technique pioneered by filmmakers, weaves soul and rock songs into her plot in a way that might best be understood in terms of Roland Barthes’s theory of photography. The seemingly tortured logic required to formulate Wendy Wasserstein’s use of intermediality in The Heidi Chronicles (1988) belies the effortless way the properties of one medium can be integrated into the framework of another. In Wasserstein’s case, a visceral aural aesthetic with great cultural currency is spun into the theatrical event in a way that both complements and competes with meanings encoded via conventional dramatic devices. In the process, the expressive resources of popular music become a powerful adjunct to the meaning-making apparatus of dramatic realism. In the most basic sense, Wasserstein’s use of recorded popular music functions as an unusual, though highly effective, form of exposition. In the play, songs by Betty Everett, The Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, John Lennon, Jefferson Airplane, and Sam Cooke perform—and in the process transform—the utilitarian task of providing background information necessary for the audience’s understanding of the dramatic action. This is not background or between-the-acts music. Rather, songs, and especially their lyrics, are foregrounded as an integral part of the plot. While comparable to the usual modes of dramatic exposition (dialogue, soliloquy, prologue/chorus, and narration), Wasserstein’s use of music is more subtle and efficient, capitalizing on the informational density of popular music 1 to guide the audience and connect the drama to a series of cultural and historical backdrops. But the songs do more than simply communicate information. They also, and much more dramatically, communicate somatically as resonant events in the lived experience of the audience. “Music moves us, quite literally,” Stephen Davies points out, “and often we are unaware of the small motions we make in response to it.” 2 When it comes to rock ’n’ roll music, “These material or ‘visceral’ properties of rock are registered in the body core, in the gut, and in the muscles and sinews of the arms and legs rather than in any intellectual faculty of judgment.” 3 “The