Word: theater
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Even today, there is something unreal for Wasserstein in seeing her name illuminated on a marquee in the heart of New York City's theater district. "I'm an off-Broadway baby," she explains. "When my friends and I write, we imagine small audiences." In fact, The Heidi Chronicles was originally written to be performed at the tiny, 156-seat Playwrights Horizon, the nurturing off-Broadway base camp for a generation of younger playwrights like Wasserstein. Only after the play opened at Playwrights last December to rave reviews and a sold-out three-month run were arrangements made to transport...
...play that includes a scene built around a 1970 feminist consciousness-rais ing group ("Either you shave your legs or you don't" is the refrain) and is filled with arcane political references can ever be commercially successful. "I'm not stupid," Wasserstein laughs. "I don't know if theater parties will say, 'Let's go to this. It's got a great Herbert Marcuse joke...
...Theater people. And I don't mean actors, directors or producers. They're fine. I mean theater people, people who can't see beyond the pages of Sam Shepard or Pirandello and act as if a single production can change the world and tend to get bogged down in the so-called creative process and go on and on about "motivation" and being "in character" and all that other jargony stuff...
...farces, and the cheapest of four new musicals cost $5 million to stage, it is heartening to see work as simple, spare and serious as Metamorphosis. One just wishes it were better. Despite an effective stage- acting debut by dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, the most ballyhooed highbrow event in the theater so far this year is all but bereft of emotional force. At the finale, two actresses stand rigid, their cheeks glazed with tears, yet much of the audience reacts only with uneasy titters. Director Steven Berkoff's highly stylized script and direction circle around the story, adding layer upon layer...
...Gorbachev's new prominence to both glasnost and her % natural self-confidence. But not all Soviets approve of Raisa's high profile. Groused one Muscovite: "What is the meaning of Raisa this, Raisa that? Am I supposed to live like she does?" At a televised celebration at the Bolshoi Theater after her speech, it was clear that she has not totally broken the traditional mold of Soviet leaders' spouses. Mikhail Gorbachev sat on the dais, while Raisa watched from the audience...