Word: wassersteins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...anger came first, but it is not an easy emotion for playwright Wendy Wasserstein. Her natural instinct is to charm, to disarm, to retreat from harm. The nervous giggles, the wispy, high-pitched voice, the ingratiating brown eyes and perhaps even the plump figure all seem protective camouflage. For Wasserstein, self-mocking humor has always been the first line of defense against both the judgment of others and her enveloping Jewish family, which cannot understand why a nice girl like Wendy is not married with children at 38. Even her closest friends sometimes find her hard to take entirely seriously...
...such surface judgments mask the intensity within Wasserstein, the vision that spawned her new hit Broadway play, The Heidi Chronicles. "I wrote this play because I had this image of a woman standing up at a women's meeting saying, 'I've never been so unhappy in my life,' " Wasserstein explains. "Talking to friends, I knew there was this feeling around, in me and in others, and I thought it should be expressed theatrically. But it wasn't. The more angry it made me that these feelings weren't being expressed, the more anger I put into that play...
...Wasserstein is far too deft a satirist, and far too gentle a person, to compose a screed. Instead, with subtlety and humor in The Heidi Chronicles, she has written a memorable elegy for her own lost generation. Heidi tells the story of a slightly introverted art historian, a fellow traveler in the women's movement, who clings to her values long after her more committed friends switch allegiance from communes to consuming. At the pivotal moment in the play's second act, Heidi (played by Joan Allen) stands behind a lectern on a bare stage, giving a luncheon speech...
There has always been a feminist subtext to Wasserstein's plays, even in her earlier work when she relied on Jewish-mother jokes and collegiate sexual confusions for laughs. Her first success, Uncommon Women and Others, depicted a reunion of Mount Holyoke College alumnae six years after they have left the campus to make their way in the working world. The 1977 off-Broadway cast included Glenn Close, Jill Eikenberry and Swoosie Kurtz. Her 1983 hit comedy, Isn't It Romantic, which ran for two years off-Broadway, is a thinly veiled tale of Wasserstein's relations with...
Only in a written playscript does Wasserstein allow herself to be assertive. In conversation, she flees from all self-important declarations of artistic intention. It takes coaxing for Wasserstein just to admit that Heidi represents her bid "to demand attention and announce, 'I have something to say, and I want you to listen.' " She is much more comfortable recalling Heidi's early off-Broadway previews when she was scared that "all the people from Isn't It Romantic would show up waiting for the chicken jokes." Here her voice breaks into a hypertheatrical tone as she parodies the reaction...