Word: wassersteins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...Wendy Wasserstein...
...portrait of a generation, Wendy Wasserstein's new play is more documentary than drama, evoking fictionally all the right times and places but rarely attaining much thorny particularity about the people who inhabit them. The plot, such as it is, often seems like an unconscious cartoon of feminist dialectic. Two men stay close to the title character through the years: a pediatrician who is handsome, earnest, dedicated, kind, politically correct from a left-wing perspective and irreversibly gay, and a heterosexual who is grasping, impatient, domineering, shallow, as undependable as quicksilver and, for Heidi, sexually irresistible. This is the there...