Word: wasserstein
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Romantic, by Wendy Wasserstein, is an amusing look at the struggles two women in their late 20s face as they try to balance the demands of their careers, their parents, their boyfriends and their own independence...
...Harvard-Radcliffe Summer Theater presentation of the play has some nagging problems, but is worth seeing and guaranteed to make you laugh. Wasserstein manages to balance the different aspects of the work very well. She doesn't pull punches with her Jewish mother jokes, but she avoids the kind of vicious self hatred bordering on anti-Semitism that afflicts some Jewish comedy. She also successfully walks the tightrope between family-bashing, man-hating feminism and family-centered, woman ignoring sexism...
...triumph for Sullivan, 52, who is one of the most successful directors not only in regional theater but on the commercial stage as well. In New York City he is currently represented by Herb Gardner's Conversations with My Father on Broadway and Wendy Wasserstein's The Sisters Rosensweig, which will transfer from off-Broadway to Broadway in March. His director's royalties for those shows are shared with Seattle Rep, where all those shows originated (as did Gardner's I'm Not Rappaport and Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles, also staged...
...other end of the scale of suffering is Wasserstein's wry comedy about three sisters (yes, they make frequent references to Chekhov) whose problem is not failing to get to Moscow but failing to stay, spiritually, in their ancestral Jewish Brooklyn. All three are compulsive achievers. The eldest, broodingly played by Jane Alexander, is a global banker based in London, where the others have come to visit. The youngest (Frances McDormand) is a tomboyish travel writer who lives more for the escape of travel than for the art of writing. The middle sister (Madeline Kahn) is a self-credentialed / psychotherapist...
...other characters include the banker's daughter, a student whose delving into family history prompts her elders to do the same, and four men who appear vital to these women's lives but who are one by one sloughed off. Wasserstein is interested in serious issues; the sisters are assimilated Jews who only slowly reawaken to the importance of their culture and religion, while on the periphery the men debate a host of topics from current headlines. But in form and uproarious dialogue the play is a commercial comedy. On that level, Sisters is a delight and is exquisitely performed...