Word: wassersteins
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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...
...entirely a natural migration. Even Wasserstein wonders if a 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...
...York papers, as is the custom, chose to let their off- Broadway reviews stand. An "enlightening portrait of her generation," declared the Times, while Newsday poured on the laudatory adjectives: "smart, compassionate, witty, courageous." There were some sharp dissents. TIME's theater critic, William A. Henry III, complained that "Wasserstein has written mostly whiny and self-congratulatory cliches...
...playwright does not deny that bad reviews wound. But these days, there is also a keen pride as Wasserstein views her handiwork on Broadway. "I'm normally a self-deprecating person," she says, putting it mildly. "But when I saw those women on stage in the feminist rap group, I said, 'Good for them, and good for us.' This is a play of ideas. Whether you agree or not doesn't matter...
...Wasserstein compares the gathering momentum of her theatrical career to the children's story The Little Engine That Could. Heidi was written in 1987 after a frustrating period that included a musical that never made it out of workshop readings and a filmscript for Steven Spielberg that was shelved. Then, as now, she was living in a Greenwich Village apartment, with no formal attachments aside from a cat named Ginger. Relentlessly social, Wasserstein has built a life revolving around an intricate network of friendships, many with other playwrights. But writing Heidi represented, in part, an acknowledgment that Wasserstein, like...