Jack Heifner’s Vanities, a bittersweet comedy astutely chronicling the lives of three Texas girls, remains as provocative, stimulating and hilarious as the day it was written. Premiering off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons on January 15, 1976, the play had an astonishingly successful off-Broadway run at the Chelsea Theatre Center (now the Westside Theatre), where it ran for 1,785 performances. Heifner later collaborated with composer/lyricist David Kirshenbaum to create Vanities: The Musical (US/UK), which opened off-Broadway at Second Stage Theater on July 16, 2009. Both the play and musical continue to enthrall audiences worldwide.
We recently spoke to the playwright about the show’s genesis, development and legacy, celebrating the enduring appeal of Vanities nearly half a century after its creation. Here are highlights from our conversation.
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For those who may not know the play or musical, can you briefly summarize Vanities?
It is the story of a friendship. It really isn’t a play about women as much as it’s about a time in the USA when we were raised in an innocent environment; then came the John F. Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, social unrest, Roe v. Wade, and many other events that changed our world into something different and far less innocent than it was in the 1950’s. We were left wondering who are we? The characters in the play were not given any game plan for the new world that was coming.
Where did the idea for Vanities come from? Did you really know a Mary, Joanne and Kathy?
It came first from the set. I am a very visual person and usually write from a setting then put the characters in it. I wanted the actors to dress and make-up onstage, to “apply” the characters and for the audience to see them change and age. It was looking into their private world as they looked into the mirror. I was the same age as the characters in the third scene of the play when I wrote it, so in many ways I was trying to figure out what to do with my life. I thought I wanted to be a playwright and the success of the play told me I was one.
I knew several women named Kathy, Mary and Joanne. They all thought the play was about them. However, I had three very specific people in mind when I wrote the first scene. Then I made up the rest. It’s not a true story of three people I knew, but I did imagine three people from my high school days at the start. Thankfully, they are all still my friends and find the play amusing. None of them turned out like the characters in the play.
Is it true you wrote Vanities just a few days?
Yes, it was a day and half. I wrote the first two scenes in one day and the last scene the next day. It had taken me several years to write the first play, CASSEROLE, but the second one, Vanities, was fast. My first play opened at Playwrights Horizons in 1975 and I was shocked at the laughter, that people thought my writing was funny. I went home and wrote Vanities the next week and by that fall we were in rehearsal. I wanted to write something simple. I felt my first play tried to cover too many subjects at once. Vanities is a play about people whose lives are about nothing substantial. The characters in the play aren’t given a successful game plan for life.
You mention in the play’s foreword that the play’s title has several meanings. Did you have the idea for the title first, and then create the concept of women at their dressing tables? Or was it the other way around?
It was the other way around. The setting came first. The title came last. The play was called something else when I was writing it, then later I took the name Vanities from a line in the play and it also seemed appropriate with the women making up at vanities onstage. The line was in the third act: “we were only involved with our vanities.” I cut the line in rehearsals and took Vanities as the title.
Vanities captures the changing relationship of three women at different stages of their lives. Many women have said the play accurately reflects their relationship with their own girlfriends. How did you, a man, capture this nuanced portrait of female friendship?
I have never thought it was a play about women. It’s a play about friendship. I wrote it about women because theatre in 1975 had very few plays with a cast of all women. In fact, I was told by producers then “you can’t put three women onstage together and sell tickets.” Seventies plays were very “male dominated.” I decided to prove the producers wrong. Also, plays being written about that time were dealing with Vietnam and the effects of war mostly on men. I decide to write about the people I grew up with, who really cared nothing about the war (like too many Americans) and only cared about themselves. By the second scene of the play, the world is changing due in large part to the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the loss of innocence in the United States as a result. In the second scene, the friendship of the three characters is evolving in the same way the world was changing. The play could have been about men, but I was interested in writing about women because very few plays were being done with women.
The play was controversial when it opened. It made some people angry. I wrote about characters who thought about themselves first and the world second. Also, it was at the height of the women’s movement and many people found them on different sides in that argument, like the women in the last scene of the play. One must remember, the play came along before the plays of Wendy Wasserstein, Beth Henley, Marsha Norman and many women writers. I think the play’s success opened doors for those women’s voices to be heard. There hadn’t really been too many successful women writers in decades before Vanities opened. Men were the people writing plays then and the lead characters were usually men. I tried to change that.
These young women are from Texas, and you’ve mentioned that their accents and patterns of speech are crucial to the play. How so, and why?
Only because I thought they were from a small-town environment and have a small view of the world. I always said Mary and Kathy begin to lose their accents in the play, but Joanne does not, mainly because Joanne does not grow. In the beginning they talk alike, they look alike and they think alike. That is why they are all dressed the same in the first scene. The second scene shows them beginning to develop separate personalities. In the last scene, they have grown apart in their lives and in their thinking.
How much of you is in each of these women? Which character most closely resembles yourself?
I am all three characters. I was born Joanne, I became a rebel like Mary and then I became a person searching for an identity like Kathy. I am closer to Kathy because when I wrote the play I had many unanswered questions about life (as she does) and I was trying to figure out what I wanted. Kathy is “unfinished” on purpose and that was intentional on my part. She is the character people talk about when they leave the theatre. When I first wrote the play I gave all the answers (like who she’s living with, what is her sexuality), but in previews I began to remove information about Kathy in the final scene. I wanted some mystery to her. She is to me the hope of the play because she is looking for meaning in her life.
I recently reread the play and I was laughing out loud as I read it. Was some of the humor born in the rehearsal process, or was most of it already on the page?
Most of it was on the page when we started rehearsal. Because I had such wonderful actors and such a brilliant director, we played with a lot of things in the final scene. It had many endings before we found the one we liked best. I could not have had better collaborators than the people who first did the play. It’s always a blessing when everyone involved is “doing the same show.” It’s important in the evolution of a new piece because it’s a fragile process. It’s so easy to get things wrong and so hard to get things right. Garland Wright and Kathy Bates had gone to college with me. Ours was an old friendship, and I had known Jane Galloway and Susan Merson for years in New York because we were members of the same theatre company, The Lion Theatre. We were friends putting on a play about friends. I remember at some point in the preview process thinking, “It’s finished.” I haven’t had the thought many times when working on a new play.
The humor also changes as the show progresses, from broad laughs in the first scene to harsher, more sardonic commentary in the third.
I think I was more cynical in the 1970’s than I am now. I didn’t understand that friendships can last despite people being different and growing apart. Now I know that friendships can last a lifetime. I put some of that in the musical of the play since there’s a final scene when the women are in their forties. Old friends know one another very well because they were there from the beginning. I think forgiveness is something the women in the musical learn in the final scene and, despite changes, their love is based on knowing each other for such a long time. To me, the play and the musical are different journeys. In the play we think the women may not see one another ever again. In the musical, they do.
Vanities works in sets of three; we see three women at three different points in their lives. How does this relate to the show’s themes?
Three is always a better idea to me than one or two. You can have people take sides (two against one) and visually a triangle is more interesting than a straight line. There’s much more variety. However, I think I chose three characters because one represents what we were taught growing up, one is the rebellious side of us that challenges what we were taught and the last is the voice of reason that hopefully comes into our lives in our late twenties. What do I want, rather than what do my parents want or what does the world think of me? Who am I?
Of the three women, Kathy seems the most unsettled and directionless in the end. What does her arc, as compared to conservative housewife Joanne or sexually liberated urbanite Mary, say about women and America at that time?
I do think Kathy is the “hope” of the play and closer to where many women were going in the 1970’s. She is examining her life and her past and she is unsure what she wants, which is good. She is not satisfied with her existence and that makes her an explorer. Joanne and
Mary are straight lines (they will change later) but Kathy is already evolving in scene three. She has gone through a liberation of sorts and has a long way to go. She invites her best friends from growing up to get together to see if they have changed or if they are feeling anything similar what she is going through. They are not. It is part of Kathy’s process of “letting go” to see what her best friends from high school and college are like now. She sees they can’t understand at all what she is feeling. They have the past in common, but very little ties them together in the present. Kathy is exactly where women’s movement was when the play opened. She is liberating herself from the cliched ideas of women’s roles in society. She is going through a journey into understanding who she is and not what society tells her to be.
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