Wendy Wasserstein
From Philosopedia
Wasserstein, Wendy (18 October 1950 - 30 January 2006)
Born in Brooklyn and raised in Manhattan, Wasserstein received a BA from Mount Holyoke College and an MFA in 1976 from the Yale School of Drama. Her father was a textile manufacturer, her mother an amateur dancer. At City College, she studied creative writing with Joseph Heller and Israel Horovitz.
Her off-Broadway 1978 play,Uncommon Women and Others, was produced at the Phoenix Theatre and depicted a formal reunion of a group of Mount Holyoke graduates, one that dissolved into scenes of their college days, and described by Edith Oliver in The New York as "funny, ironic, and affectionate." Added Ms. Oliver,
- Under the laughter there is . . . a feeling of bewilderment and disappointment over the world outside college, which promised so much, and with their own dreams, which seem to have stalled.
When filmed and telecast on PBS's "Great Performances," it became a breakthrough in the careers of the actresses Glenn Close, Swoosie Kurtz, and Meryl Streep, who played Ms. Close's role in the television version.
Her popular 1983 play, Isn't It Romantic, was evidence of Wasserstein's ability, according to Isherwood,
- to salve a little of that feeling of aloneness in her audiences with her deeply felt portraits of women - and occasionally men - seeking solidarity in their individuality, finding comfort in the knowledge that everybody else is sometimes uncomfortable with the choices they've made, too.
In the play, a character appears to speak her personal outlook:
- No matter how lonely you get or how many birth announcements you receive, the trick is not to get frightened. There's nothing wrong with being alone.
In 1988,she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics Circle Prize, the Drama Desk Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and the Tony Award for her play, The Heidi Chronicles, which was directed by Daniel Sullivan. The play chronicled in an episodic, seriocomic way the biography, according to Isherwood, "of an art historian who was trying to establish a fixed and fulfilling sense of identity amid the social convulutions of the 1960s and 70's, a period when the rulebook on relationships between men and women was being rewritten. Heidi's allegiance to her ideals and her unwillingness to compromise them for the sake of winning a man's attentions caused conflict with friends who chose easier or different paths. Looking around at her materialistic, married, self-obsessed peers two decades after the exhilarating birth of feminism, Heidi observes,
- We're all concerned, intelligent, good women. It's just that I feel stranded. And I thought the whole point was that we wouldn't feel stranded. I thought the point was that we were all in this together.
Continued the Times theater critic,
- In the play's bittersweet final scene, Heidi has become a single mother to a new infant - a path Ms Wasserstein would herself pursue many years later, ultimately at great physical cost, when she gave birth, at ae 48, to her daughter, Lucy Jane, in 1999.
The Sisters Rosensweig opened in October 1992 at the Lincoln Center in New York City, then moved to Broadway in March 1993 and later to London where Janet Suzman and Maureen Lipman starred and Michael Blakemore directed.
An American Daughter ran at the Cort Theater on Broadway in 1997 and starred Kate Nelligan.
Old Money opened at the Lincoln Center in New York in the fall of 2000.
Wasserstein also wrote a collection of essays, Bachelor Girls (Knopf). Two of her books are The Heidi Chronicles and Other Plays (Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich) and The Sisters Rosensweig (Harcourt, Brace).
She served on the Council of the Dramatists Guild; on the Board of the British American Arts Association; and the MacDowell Colony Board. She has taught at Columbia University and New York University, and holds an Honorary Doctorate from Mt. Holyoke College. In addition, she served as contributing editor of New York Woman and was a contributing editor of Harper's Bazaar. A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, she later served on the Guggenheim Foundation Board and taught playwriting at several universities.
A page one 31 January 2006 New York Times obituary by Charles Isherwood commenced,
- Wendy Wasserstein, who spoke for a generation of smart, drive but sometimes unsatisfied women in a series of popular plays that included the long-running Pulitzer Prize winner The Heidi Chronicles, died yesterday at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. She was 55 and lived in New York. The cause was complications of lymphoma, said André Bishop, the artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater. . . . The lights on Broadway are to be dimmed tonight in her honor.
Bishop said of Wasserstein,
- She was known for being a popular, funny playwright, but she was also a woman and a writer of deep conviction and political activism. In Wendy's plays women saw thmselves portrayed in a way they hadn't been onsstage before - wittily, intelligently and seriously at the same time. We take that for granted now, but it was not the case 25 years ago. She was a real pioneer.
In an essay in Shiksa Goddess, Wasserstein described the medical complications of her late-life pregnancy and her newborn daughter's early struggles:
- Although I remain a religious skeptic, I had a kind of blind faith. I believed in the collaboration between the firm will of my one-pound-twelve ounce daughter and the expertise of modern medicine. Of course, there was more than a bit of random luck involved too.
The daughter, Lucy Jane, will live with Ms. Wasserstein's brother Bruce. The father was never publicly identified.
Contents |
Works
Plays
- Third (play) (2005)
- Old Money (2002)
- An American Daughter (1997)
- The Sisters Rosensweig (1992)
- The Heidi Chronicles (1988)
- Isn’t It Romantic (1983)
- Tender Offer (1983)
- Uncommon Women and Others (1977)
- Any Woman Can't (1973)
Screenplays
- The Object of My Affection (1998)
Books
- Elements of Style (a novel), forthcoming, April 2006 (Knopf).
- Sloth. New York: Oxford University Press (2005)
- Shiksa Goddess : or, How I Spent My Forties : Essays. New York: Knopf (2001)
- Bachelor Girls. New York: Knopf, Distributed by Random House (1990)
