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Dig those bell bottoms — big, elephant bell bottoms with the waist cut up around the rib cage and yards of denim washed to baby blue. Can you believe people once bought these jeans not as a joke but because they were chic?

Heidi Holland wears a pair for a while as she chronicles her weary path from 1965 high school grad to late '80s art historian. She was stylish then, just as her angsty uncertainty about her life fit the zeitgeist. We had the luxury of burrowing into our small lives — what they call today first-world problems.

Bell bottoms such as Heidi wore are not timeless and neither, unfortunately, are the circumstances and characters in Wendy Wasserstein's "The Heidi Chronicles," which opened Friday at the Guthrie Theater.

Perhaps nostalgia governed our expectations that this Pulitzer and Tony winner from 1989 would reveal eternal truths about fulfillment (or lack thereof) through Heidi's commentary on her life and times. Rather, the realization creeps up during director Leigh Silverman's flat production that these people are temporal and unlikable. Scoop Rosenbaum has an impossible ego; Peter Patrone is precious and Heidi herself is never happy.

That, of course, was Wasserstein's intention — to show how this shy, bookish young woman never quite found the sweet spot of contentment in an era when women were urged to "have it all."

Her friends made firm choices — to torch their undergarments and steep themselves in a women's collective, to be a mother and wife, or to feed at the trough of soulless success. Whiny Heidi only smiles at them — a smile that judges with its passive color of disappointment.

Actor Kate Wetherhead plays Heidi much as the character sees herself — "a highly informed spectator." She is intelligent, friendly, thoughtful and fearful about sticking her toe into the waters of life.

Heidi watches in fear as her friend Susan (Tracey Maloney) lusts for a guy who can smoke a cigarette and twist his hips at the same time. Her closest friendship with a man is platonic: Peter (Zach Shaffer) wants to dance when he's a little tipsy and to save the world when he's earnest. His sexual orientation, though, limits the relationship. Scoop (Ben Graney), who woos Heidi at a Gene McCarthy rally with his intelligence and resourcefulness, is a cad who rarely examines his philandering, self-important life.

At least those three are plunging forward — blindly on occasion — into the unkown. Wetherhead's Heidi keeps uncertainty at arm's length. Is this wisdom or the fear of making a mistake? Perhaps those are two sides of the same coin and we admire the sensibility of caution. That doesn't make for riveting drama. Heidi has chums, career, opportunities, disappointments. She's not feeling totally complete but hey, welcome to the world, my friend.

The cheap fun of this play is watching the stereotypes Wasserstein props up along Heidi's journey: Mo Perry portrays a profane feminist clad in a military shirt (the costumes by Clint Ramos perfectly express character). Stacia Rice is a glittering stick of eye candy as the bubble-headed host of a talk show.

Wasserstein's snapshot of a woman's life, from 25 years ago, remains an important intellectual inquiry of its time. Our cynicism, the world's volatility, the din of every person's belief in their own righteousness (Facebooked lately?) leaves us, sadly, with remembrances of oddball hairstyles and fashions.

Graydon Royce • graydon.royce@startribune.com