Wendy Wasserstein

Playwright

• Born: October 18, 1950
• Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
• Died: January 30, 2006
• Place of death: New York, New York

Wasserstein brought the issues of gender and feminism to the Broadway stage and created characters of Jewish heritage who are not caricatures or stereotypes but honest and authentic portraits.

Early Life

Wendy Wasserstein (WAW-sur-steen) was the youngest of four children born to textile manufacturer Morris Wasserstein and his wife Lola, both Polish immigrants. Wendy Wasserstein attended primary school at Yeshiva Flatbush, where she made her stage debut as Queen Esther in a second-grade play. As a youngster, she took dancing lessons at the June Taylor School of Dance, and after the class, her parents frequently took her to the theater. When she was about ten, Wasserstein began to wonder why there were not more females like herself in the plays

As the textile business prospered, the family moved to the upper East Side in Manhattan. Wasserstein attended and graduated from the Calhoun School, where her writing skills were utilized in creating scripts for the annual mother-daughter fashion show. Her education continued at Mount Holyoke College, with a stint at Amherst College in her junior year, and a playwriting course at Smith, which she enjoyed tremendously, but her bachelor’s degree in 1971 was in history.

Uncertain of her future and reluctant to declare a career as a playwright, Wasserstein pursued a master’s degree in creative writing at the City College of New York, where she studied with Israel Horovitz and Joseph Heller. She wrote a play in Horovitz’s class entitled Any Woman Can’t (1973), which was produced by the newly formed Off-Off Broadway Playwrights Horizons in New York. After earning her degree in 1973, however, she applied both to business school and to the Yale School of Drama. Although other family members were involved in business, seeking the master’s degree in fine arts at Yale became her choice.

In the 1970’s, Yale was bursting with creative talents; Wasserstein collaborated with Christopher Durang on a play entitled When Dinah Shore Ruled the Earth (1975). Still, her interest in plays for women was increased by her distaste for their representation in Jacobean drama. For her master’s thesis, she wrote a version of Uncommon Women and Others (1977) with a cast of nine women, which was performed as a one-act play.

Life’s Work

In her four decades as an author, Wasserstein wrote six major plays, several one-acts, two screenplays, five books, and innumerable essays. It was her plays, however, that brought her the most prominence, featuring women such as herself, those she did not see on the stage in her childhood.

Revised and produced Off-Broadway in 1977, Uncommon Women and Others offers five women meeting for lunch and reminiscing about their experience as undergraduates during the 1970’s at Mount Holyoke College. The first generation of women exposed to the ideas of feminists such as Germaine Greer and Betty Friedan, they are encouraged but confused about the choices open to them professionally and personally.

Isn’t It Romantic, produced in 1981, examines the plight of liberal women in the next decade. Two college friends, one a Jew, one a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP), each with a dominating mother, struggle to find their identities in New York in a changing social environment. The question of having a profession and family, or of settling for one or the other, is paramount.

Wasserstein’s most important play,The Heidi Chronicles, opened on Broadway in 1989. Its idealistic central figure, Heidi, moves through a period of twenty-five years, from the early days of radical feminism, through the consciousness raising of the 1970’s, to the myth of the superwoman who could have a family and profession in the 1980’s, to the adoptive mothers and feminist disillusionment in the 1990’s. The play was awarded the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, the Tony Award, the Pulitzer Prize and several others. There was criticism that Wasserstein had sold out to the commercial establishment, and that Heidi’s choice to adopt a child was a betrayal of feminism, but with the passage of time such criticisms have been revised or muted.

In all her plays Jewish women are central, and Jewish references abound. Janie Blumberg apologizes for spilling horseradish on the baby at Hanukkah in Isn’t It Romantic; Susan exits with Scoop to do the hora in The Heidi Chronicles; the Rosensweig sisters mock each other with New York Jewish accents in The Sisters Rosensweig (1992); and Dr. Kaufman leaves to participate in the service of Holy Taschlich in An American Daughter (1996).

A passionate supporter of the theater, Wasserstein pioneered the Open Door program, taking a group of high school math and science students to the theater regularly through the school year. The first group of eight was so successful that the program grew to fifteen groups from high schools throughout the city.

Wasserstein never married, although, like her heroine Heidi, she rejected the proposal of a New York lawyer when she was about thirty. In her forties, she yearned for a child, and after an exhaustive eight years of trying to become pregnant, she conceived by in vitro fertilization. In her sixth month of pregnancy she suffered preeclampsia and was hospitalized for three weeks until the premature birth of her daughter, Lucy Jane, by cesarean section in September, 1999. Wasserstein was forty-eight years old. A few years later, Wasserstein developed lymphoma, and she died on January 30, 2006. The lights of Broadway were dimmed in her honor that evening.

Significance

Wasserstein succeeded in correcting the dearth of female characters on the stage that she so insightfully noticed as a child by populating her plays with Jewish women who are witty and intelligent and who question gender relationships and women’s traditional roles. The Wasserstein canon is unusual because the central figures correlate in age with Wasserstein’s age as she wrote each play, from the women in their twenties in Uncommon Women, which she wrote when she was in her twenties, to the older woman in her fifties in Third (2005), her last play, which she wrote when she was in her early fifties. Thus, her plays serve as a documentary of the feminist issues that surrounded her during the forty years of her career.

Bibliography

Balakian, Jan. “Wendy Wasserstein: A Feminist Voice from the Seventies to the Present.” In The Cambridge Companion to American Women Playwrights, edited by Brenda Murphy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Discusses Wasserstein’s political and feminist positions in her five major plays.

Barko, Courtney Cronberg. “Rediscovering Female Voice and Authority: The Revival of Female Artists in Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles.” Frontiers 29, no. 1 (2008): 122-138. Analyzes the paintings that Heidi concentrates upon in her lectures in The Heidi Chronicles and argues that the artists are women struggling to find recognition.

Barnett, Claudia, ed. Wendy Wasserstein: A Casebook. Casebook on Modern Dramatists 26. New York: Garland, 1999. Nine essays and an interview with Wasserstein. Includes several articles critical of the feminism in Wasserstein’s plays.

Ciociola, Gail. Wendy Wasserstein: Dramatizing Women, Their Choices, and Their Boundaries. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1998. A close examination of the five major plays.

Dolan, Jill. “Feminist Performance Criticism and the Popular: Reviewing Wendy Wasserstein.” Theatre Journal 60, no. 3 (October, 2008): 433-457. Dolan revises her earlier opinion that Wasserstein had nothing to say about feminism and concludes that playwrights working in the commercial theater have much to add to the debate about women.

Wasserstein, Wendy. Shiksa Goddess (or, How I Spent My Forties). New York: Vintage Books, 2002. A witty, smart collection of Wasserstein’s essays. Most moving are the two essays about the death of her sister Sandra and her own difficult pregnancy.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “An Uncommon Woman: An Interview with Wendy Wasserstein.” Interview by Jackson Bryer. Theatre History Studies 29 (January, 2009). An entertaining, anecdotal article. Wasserstein speaks at length about her career and her writing process.