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I arrived at Smith College some 20 years after Wendy Wasserstein attended neighboring Mount Holyoke, which she wrote about famously in her first major play,
Uncommon Women and Others (1977). Even as — or perhaps because — I majored in theater and women's studies, I was cavalierly dismissive of Wasserstein's work. The plays seemed domestic and small, commercial and clever, well built but not theatrically experimental, dated and designed for a narrow, middle-class Jewish audience and feminists who had come of age in the 70s and wanted to see themselves and their experiences on stage.
That urge at once to take for granted and to reject the achievements of the preceding generation is something Wasserstein was addressing by the time I was cutting my cynical critical baby teeth, in her Pulitzer- and Tony-winning play,
The Heidi Chronicles (1989). The play follows Heidi Holland, a feminist art historian, in an episodic journey from her adolescence in the 1960s through the 1980s. The history of feminism becomes bound up in an examination of connection and legacy, of what ideas are passed between friends and through generations, of what's lost, how, and why.
In a 1990 interview, Wasserstein explained that she had found her voice with the "women's movement, the movement that said, 'Your voice is worthwhile.'" When she first looked at the stage, Wasserstein said her motivating question as a writer and a spectator was, "Where are the girls?" That prompted her thesis for Yale School of Drama with its cast of nine uncommon women. Of course simply putting female characters on stage for audiences of women to watch doesn't redress gender inequities. For starters, as Peggy Phelan so trenchantly observed in
Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (Routledge, 1993), "If representational visibility equals power, then almost-naked young white women should be running Western culture." At the same time, as Wasserstein told
The Paris Review in 1997, her writing constitutes a "political act" because she was able to command the largest advance for a play in Broadway history for
The Sisters Rosensweig (1992), because of her steady commercial success, and because she consistently wrote plays for and about intelligent women (not to mention meaty roles for actresses over 40, culminating with her 2005 play Third's menopausal heroine).
The resistance I had in my 20s to Wasserstein's work — and which I see frequently in my students now — is in part the arrogant hopefulness that the problems of an earlier generation are old hat, occasionally coupled with a growing anxiety that they might not be. This is not exclusively a young person's reaction. Following mixed reviews of
An American Daughter, her 1996 play about a woman's failed nomination to become surgeon general, Wasserstein records in an essay her older sister Sandra's observation that "it's very hard to say anything about women now. ... It's much easier for everyone to believe we're past it."
But although Wendy Wasserstein died last month, we are not past the need for what her work has to offer. Her abundant interest in ideas about gender and how patterns of behavior are inherited or changed is matched by her enthusiasm for the extended workings of Judaism, family, money, and art. What is more, at its best, Wasserstein's work manages to present a nearly anachronistic example of how to reject cynicism, remain hopeful, and yet retain a witty ironic edge.
-- Tamsen Wolff,
The Chronicle Review
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