I’ll never forget when I first saw Uncommon Women and Others. I was in college at the University of Georgia when it was performed and I was introduced to Wendy Wasserstein’s playwriting. The characters in the show keep postponing their age by which they will be “pretty fucking amazing.” The goal seems both impossible to define and unattainable. “I keep a list of options,” says Holly, the main character at the end of the show. ”Just from today’s lunch, there’s law, insurance, marry Leonard Woolf, have a baby, birdwatch in Bolivia. A myriad of openings.”
Her plays were full of life-changing lines like that.
I spent the next few years developing my own love of theater, and setting the stage for moving to New York City not long after graduation. Her future plays stand out in my memory as plays that altered my way of thinking. They were about women I could relate to. They had feminist undertones, Jewish connections and they provided me with a new way of thinking about how far women had come…..or not. At the end of each play, her characters question their choices. Don’t we all?
I saw Wendy Wasserstein speak whenever possible after that. When she came to my college campus in 1989/1990, I sat in the audience to hear my heroine speak about her playwriting process. She had recently become a Pulitzer Prize winner with Chronicles and seemed to trumpet onto campus on a high. Her speech was as funny and exhilarating as her work. Later I would be mesmerized by Sisters Rosenweig, which I would see with my two sisters (we were the Sisters Rosen) and, again, her play made me think about the changing status of women in the world and about my own personal path. A long time member of Lincoln Center, I was witness to all her debuts in the 90s and the early 2000s including An American Daughter and Third. Her plays became special experiences for my sisters and I to share.
That’s what her plays did. They made women think. They made us relate. They made us think twice about our choices. When Wasserstein became the first woman to win both a Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award in the same year, it was though her work had been vindicated. Anyone who had doubted her or her role in the feminism movement would have to think twice. And she was more amazed than anyone. After each play she wrote in the beginning, she had no idea if it would see the light of day yet alone win a prize. She was thrilled with her fame and never expected any of it to happen to her.
I was lucky to hear her speak again in 2002 at a Hadassah conference in Florida. She talked about the road to become a Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning writer and her determination to write compelling roles for women. I remember what she said well: “I didn’t see anyone on stage who looked like me,” she said. “I wanted to see an all-female curtain call.” She was a woman who had made a profound difference on my life and so many others.
But it was at that conference that I saw a change in Wasserstein from the years before when I seen her speak in college. One half of her face no longer moved. I knew that she had delivered a child several years prior, but I had no idea how the impact of labor had affected her health.
A few short years later I would hear about her death. By that point, I had two children and was working part-time, making decisions that were largely discussed in her plays, and I was shocked. Shocked facing the reality that Wendy Wasserstein would no longer be around to lead female playwrights and writers toward more success in theater and shocked that she would not be around to guide as me through motherhood as she had through my life as a woman before I got married and had children. Her death was very important and talked about in New York City, it made the cover of the New York Times and the theaters had moments of silence that night in her memory.
In Julie Salamon’s autobiography of Wasserstein, she starts out by telling us that when Wasserstein died, “Strangers wept and columnists euologized. She was remembered as a significant playwright, but also as a quintessential New Yorker, the toast of the tough and glamorous metropolis. She had an uncanny ability to know almost every major player in theater, publishing and politics, right up to the White House. Because she wrote about women and the subjects that concerned them, she was designated feminist. But with Wasserstein everything, including politics, tended to be personal.”
Salamon spent three years working on Wendy and the Lost Boys, after her agent and her longtime friend and Wasserstein’s colleague, Andre Bishop, commissioned her to write it. It’s a faithful, loving portrait of a woman who loved the theater, writing, her friends, her family and laughing, not in that order (or any order). I can only imagine that Bishop and everyone who knew her is thankful for such a dedication. After reading it, I feel as though I not only understand the way Wasserstein lived, but I feel as though I know her intimate friends and understand NYC theater on an entirely new level.
Salamon became interested in writing the book when she discovered there were secrets that Wasserstein carried with her, some of which she must have taken to her grave. Wasserstein grew up with eccentric family members, all of whom provided material for her plays, articles and books (she wrote The Shiksa Goddess, a collection of stories, and a novel, The Elements of Style, which was published shortly after her death). Many of her family relationships were “complicated”. Her mother, Lola, was a domineering woman who practiced ballet until late in life and believed that a woman’s place to get married and have children. Even after the success of her youngest daughter’s plays, she’d comment more frequently about her other children’s children. When she gave birth to a daughter at the age of 48, the father’s identity was not only not made public, but when she called her mom from the hospital after going in three months before her due date, she told her mother, “Hello, Mother, I’m still in England with Flora, having a wonderful time.”
Her parents fled from Nazi Europe to New York City where her father created a thriving ribbon business and they lived amongst the very wealthy, eventually leaving Brooklyn for Manhattan. Her sister, Sandra, became a thriving business woman way before women ever made their way up in the work force and her brother, Bruce, became a billionaire on Wall Street. She had a sister, Georgette, who lived in their shadows, and a brother, Abner, who her family had put away in an institution many years ago, never to be brought back home. He was mentally disabled. Wasserstein first met him at age 50 when he asked to be brought to one of her book signings. It was a moment I can only imagine she would have somehow written into one of her plays later had she lived.
Wasserstein was born into brilliance, but it took her time to figure out her own talents. When she didn’t get into law school as planned, she spent some time after college trying to figure life out. When it came time to choose between Business School and Yale Drama School, she decided to follow her heart. Her whole life changed based on that decision. The friendships she formed there would last her entire life including Christopher Durang, Terrence McNally, William Ivey Long, Sigourney Weaver and Meryl Streep. After Yale, her friends became James Lepine, Andre Bishop, Frank Rich and a slew of New Yorkers that we all love which creates this book into not only a love letter to Wasserstein but to the city of New York and the history of New York theater. I was intrigued to find out about Bishop’s notorious start at Playwright Horizons, how Wasserstein’s plays came to be, how she came up with plots and characters (Her last play, Third, was literally based on a conversation between her and her assistant and a waiter in a restaurant.) and how she weaved her life into the plot lines. For example, she weaved her sickness into the plot of Third, giving a character breast cancer who dealt with the illness very quietly. When the director, Daniel Sullivan, questioned the addition of the character quite late during rehearsals, as Wasserstein was known to write additions up until the show’s premiere, he didn’t understand she was quietly telling the world about her illness.
Salamon explores these relationships in the book; the playwright had a number of relationships with gay men that blurred the line between platonic and romantic. She called them her “husbands”. Some of these relationships were more than platonic, but they were mostly intellectual and could endure whatever strike they took. Salamon interviewed countless friends and colleagues of Wasserstein’s who cooperated and revealed intimate details of their relationship with her. Between those conversations, letters, notes, diaries, she was able to piece together a completely viable and comprehensive tale of Wasserstein’s life.
Wasserstein became a mom at age 49, after trying for eight years. It is still not known who the father really is. She didn’t let anyone know before she died but there is much speculation as she left hints in her last book’s dedication. Gerry Gutierrez, a great theater director who died shortly after her daughter’s birth is the best prospect. He was one of her “husbands”. Her daughter, Lucy, was only six when her mother passed away. She now lives with Wasserstein’s brother, Bruce’s wife (Bruce also passed away, as did both of Wasserstein’s parents and oldest sister, Sandra) in New York City.
Wasserstein considered herself to be a feminist playwright. Throughout the book, we learn about her self doubt that served as an obstacle at times but also forced her to create unforgettable stories and characters who, like her, were smart, spirited and forever searching. She created stories that mirrored her life, but also the lives of women all around the world. She succeeded at a time when it wasn’t easy for women to succeed. It was a very different day and age in the 1970s and 1980s.
By the 1990s and for the few years of this decade that she lived, Wasserstein really lived. She wrote screenplays, she wrote wonderful pieces of theater, she wrote for the New York Times and The New Yorker, she wrote opera librettos, she spoke at graduations and universities and she spoke to young women like me. I wish I could say that times have changed significantly since Wasserstein wrote her shows about the troubles that women face, but I am not sure they have. All I know is that she helped see ourselves in her plays and I have never been more sad than I am right now when I think about all the plays she won’t write.
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