Challenging Role On Broadway For Peggy Olsen, Mad Men’s Moss Takes On ‘Heidi Chronicles’
Elisabeth Moss is set for a challenging role in Wendy Wasserstein’s Tony Award-winning The Heidi Chronicles, directed by Pam Mackinnon. The 32-year old actress, who played Peggy Olsen in Mad Men, is preparing to take the modern question of the feminist fight to Broadway in her new challenging role as Heidi Holland, and she’s brought her cats along for the ride.
Elisabeth Moss says her role in @HeidionBroadway is MAD MEN’s Peggy for the next generation: http://t.co/kRmlqiljuB pic.twitter.com/8F4jkQD8dH
— broadway.com (@broadwaycom) February 23, 2015
Gone are the cocktails of yore. As Mad Men nears its conclusion, with the last episodes of the series to be aired in April, and with Moss having moved to New York, SF Gate has reported that the actress’ switch from television to stage came as something of a shock to Moss herself.
“It’s physically far more challenging than I thought it was, mentally far more challenging. I don’t know why I didn’t realize that. I’m like, ‘Wow. Ballsy move, Moss. You really took on something bigger than you’ve done before.’ But that’s what I want to do.”
Not that Moss hasn’t done live theatre before. In 2008, the actress made her Broadway debut in Speed-The-Plow with Jeremy Piven, and took to the West End stage in The Children’s Hour with Kiera Knightley in 2011. As the Inquisitr reported, the Heidi Chronicles sees Moss return to Broadway for what comes as a challenging, tear-filled role post-Mad Men, both for the character and quite literally for the actress herself, who is most self-deprecating. As the New York Times reported, when producer Jeffrey Richards offered her the challenging role, she admitted she’d never heard of it.
“Because I’m an idiot. I didn’t go to theater school. I didn’t go to college. I just don’t read stuff.”
For those of you who also haven’t heard of it, the action of The Heidi Chronciles takes place over the 24-year period of American culture between the mid-1960s and late-1980s. Co-starring Jason Biggs as Scoop Rosenbaum and Bryce Pinkham as Peter Patrone, Wasserstein’s 1988 comedic drama focuses on the challenging situation of woman from the beginnings of feminism to its aftermath and poses the question, “What next?” The New York Times has called the play “a tour-de-force”. Indeed, Wasserstein won the 1989 Pullitzer Prize for Drama for the show.
Every actress and actor savors a challenging role. In a Broadway-revival that sees her character mature from ambitious high school student to a successful art historian who adopts a child on her own, supported by the love of her two close friends (Biggs and Pinkham), it can most definitely be said that this next stage in the Mad Men actress’ career will be the moment when that professional craving – challenging as it is – is satisfied.
[(Photo by Jason Merritt/Getty Images]
