Playing 'Heidi' Go Seek

You 'quality time' girls are going to be one generation of disappointed women. Interesting, exemplary, even sexy, but basically unhappy. The ones who open doors usually are.'' — The Heidi Chronicles

Unhappy? Seated in her luxe Central Park West sublet, her two fat cats on her lap, Wendy Wasserstein — a door opener for women writers — looks perfectly content. And why not: Her Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Heidi Chronicles is finally coming to TV.

It wasn't a simple move from Off Broadway, where Heidi was first performed in 1988, starring Joan Allen as Heidi Holland, the brilliant feminist art historian who seeks meaning in her career-driven single life. '' 'She's too strong and intelligent,' '' Wasserstein, who wrote the TV script, recalls Hollywood execs saying as they spurned the project, before Turner Broadcasting finally bought it. ''Now, maybe if her paintings had been stolen or if she'd been raped, then maybe it would have been easier.''

This time it's Jamie Lee Curtis in the role inhabited on stage at various times by Allen, Christine Lahti, Brooke Adams, Mary McDonnell, and Amy Irving. And what is the glamorous star of True Lies doing on this cable production, her first major TV role since Anything but Love fizzled in 1992? Heidi, says Curtis, ''is such a real person to me. You hardly ever see parts like this.''

It was Curtis' interest that helped cement the Turner deal for Wasserstein. ''Jamie Lee is a lot smarter than most people think,'' says Wasserstein. The actress and the author couldn't seem more different: Curtis, 36, the child of Hollywood vets, married herself to an actor, Christopher Guest, with whom she has an 8-year-old adopted daughter; Wasserstein, 44, the never-married, childless daughter of a hard-driving, literary New York Jewish clan.

And yet Curtis says her ties to Wasserstein's Heidi are manifold. In one coincidence, Heidi Holland's best friend is a gay man. Curtis' best friend was also a gay man, actor Richard Frank, who died last month of AIDS. In fact, Curtis and Wasserstein first met when Curtis came to see her most recent play, The Sisters Rosensweig, costarring Frank. ''During shooting I thought about him all the time,'' Curtis says. She sent him a tape of The Heidi Chronicles because she knew he wouldn't live to see it on television.

Curtis and Wasserstein also share Heidi-like dilemmas. ''Jamie Lee's this Hollywood baby with a great body,'' notes the playwright, ''but who she is internally and who she is externally is a source of conflict to her.'' Adds Curtis, ''People think I've had this great life, but to me it's always been about being an outsider, about struggling. I'm not how I look.''

Getting more specific about the tension between home life and job, Curtis says: ''Marriage was important to me because I've always had the malady of loneliness. I work at my family as much as my career. And I'm grateful for the women before me who fought all the really hard battles so we could do both.''

Marriage, however, has eluded Wasserstein. She says she came very close once in her 20s: ''Right about now we'd be divorced and sitting at opposite ends of the temple during the bar mitzvah, and I probably wouldn't have written most of my plays.''

In a happy parallel to Heidi, which ends with Heidi rocking her newly adopted daughter, Wasserstein plans to adopt her first child this year. ''It might have been nice to get married at 24 to a brain surgeon and have a bunch of kids,'' she says. ''But I'm lucky that we live in a time when I can go this route as well. I'm a big believer in the second part of your life.''