[Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles, and Other Plays contains the] 1989 Pulitzer Prize winner and two earlier comic dramas by, if you will, the Baby Boomers' Mary McCarthy. Less acerbic and intellectual, more sentimental and emotional, Wasserstein has the same ambition McCarthy exercised in The Group. She tries to limn a stratum of society consisting for her as for McCarthy of her fellow matriculants of the elite "Seven Sisters" colleges. In Uncommon Women and Others (1977), she actually apes The Group, setting the formative college experiences of a circle of women within the framing device of a reunion. Similarly, The Heidi Chronicles (1988) sandwiches 25 years of its art historian heroine's development, especially her relations with the man who loves her and the other man she loves, between slices of a lecture on women artists. The middle play, Isn't It Romantic? (1983), concerns two young businesswomen's struggles to live up to and give up on their parents' expectations. The focal character in all three is habitually undecided and standoffish but arrives at some self-understanding by the final curtain. All three read more somberly than they play, much like the dramas of Philip Barry (Holiday, The Philadelphia Story), whose peer Wasserstein certainly is.