TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/032789/03278900.058

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 12.2 KB | 231 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 90

Chronicler Of Frayed Feminism


WENDY WASSERSTEIN, in her play The Heidi Chronicles, asks hard
questions about her generation, but her mother would prefer a
grandchild

By Walter Shapiro


    The 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. "With that stupid little voice and ratty fur coat,"
laughs fellow playwright William Finn, "you initially think this
lady's a loon, a modern-day Dorothy Parker."  But 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."

    But 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 to the alumnae of the prep school she once
attended. Slowly the successful veneer of Heidi's life is
stripped away as she tries to ad-lib a free-form answer to the
assigned topic, "Women, Where Are We Going?" Heidi's soliloquy
ends with these words: "I don't blame any of us. We're all
concerned, intelligent, good women." Pause. "It's just that I
feel stranded. And I thought that the whole point was that we
wouldn't feel stranded. I thought the point was that we were
all in this together."

    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 her own larger-than-life mother.
But even here, Janie Blumberg, the playwright's alter ego,
rejects a suffocating marriage with a very eligible doctor and
utters Heidi-esque lines like "I made choices based on an idea
that doesn't exist anymore." Still, the spirit of the play is
more aptly conveyed by Janie's comically maladroit efforts to
cook a roast chicken for her boyfriend.

    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 of this
mythical audience: "What happened to her? Where's the chicken?"

    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 it to
Broadway.

    It was not entirely a natural migration. Even Wasserstein
wonders if a play that includes a scene built around a 1970
feminist consciousness-raising 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.' "

    Initially, at least, Marcuse has found a niche on Broadway,
with Heidi playing to houses roughly 90% full. Many of the
reviews have been a press agent's dream. The New York Daily
News's critic hailed Heidi's recent arrival on Broadway with
this pronouncement: "I doubt we'll see a better play this
season." The other New 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."

    The 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 her heroine, is a woman
alone. As Andre Bishop, the artistic director of Playwrights
Horizon, puts it, "Wendy is now coming into her own as a writer
and a person, and those two are very much linked."

    Even so, Wasserstein's natural medium remains humor. As she
explained in a painfully honest essay called "Funny Girl" in
New York Woman magazine, "I don't think about being funny very
much because it's how I get by. For me it's always been a way
to be likable but removed." The result is that outsiders can
misinterpret her manner and mistakenly belittle her talent.
Playwright Terrence McNally complains that "what people often
miss about Wendy is the thoughtful, passionate, mature womanly
side of her. She is far more interesting as a mature artist than
as this giggling, girlish, daughter-person that people want to
take care of."

    A few days after Heidi opened on Broadway, Wendy's parents
Lola and Morris Wasserstein were asked about their youngest
daughter, the successful playwright. Much of the conversation
sounded like a leftover scene from Isn't It Romantic. "We're
very proud," said Lola, who even in her 70s takes four dance
classes a day. "But there's a vacuum," added Morris, a
prosperous Manhattan businessman. "Where's the children? Where's
the husband?" Here Lola broke in, "Normally, I'm the one to say
that. But today I'm on good behavior." A few moments later, the
Wassersteins were asked how many grandchildren they have.
"Nine," said Lola, "and we're waiting for the tenth." To
underline the point, Morris chimed in, "We're waiting for Wendy.
Patiently."

    Both of these doting parents are Jewish emigres from
central Europe who came to New York City as children in the late
1920s. For years, Lola has been the richest source of her
daughter's comic material. "Do you know what my mother said to
me on the opening night of Uncommon Women?" Wasserstein asks
rhetorically. "`Wendy, where did you get those shoes?' " When
Isn't It Romantic was playing off-Broadway, Wasserstein's
parents would stroll over to the theater and canvass the crowd.
"My mother would call and say, `Oh, what well-dressed people,'"
 Wasserstein recalls. "She was proud of me because someone with
a long skirt went to see my play."

    The three other Wasserstein children are such paragons of
conventional success they could almost be lifted out of a
Judith Krantz novel. The eldest sister, Sandra Meyer, one of the
first generation of pioneering executive women, is a senior
corporate officer for Citicorp. The other sister, Georgette
Levis, married a psychiatrist and lives in Vermont, where she
owns a country inn. Growing up in affluent surroundings on the
Upper East Side of Manhattan, Wendy was closest to her brother
Bruce, three years her senior. A path-forging
mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer, he is a co-founder of the
investment-banking house Wasserstein Perella & Co., which the
Wall Street Journal dubbed "the world's hottest dealmakers."

    From Wendy's perspective, Bruce and her sisters give a new
meaning to the concept of sibling rivalry. "On a certain
level," she says, "I'm not a very competitive person, so I find
my own way." Laughing merrily, she adds, "Would you like to
throw your hat in the ring with Bruce and Sandy? Wouldn't you
go to drama school too?"

    In fact, the decision to enroll in the Yale University
School of Drama in 1973 was a turning point in her life. After
graduating from Mount Holyoke, Wendy was somewhat at loose ends
and living at home in New York. She narrowed her career options
to this odd academic choice: business school at Columbia
University or drama school. Needless to say, her parents were
vocal proponents of business school. "But finally," she
recounts, "I decided to take a chance and go to drama school,
since you should do what you want to do in life."

    Even now Wendy remains fascinated by the way she and her
brother have come to represent almost twin poles of the age-old
dialectic between art and money. Wendy delights in telling the
story of how during the off-Broadway previews of Heidi, she was
locked in an intense artistic discussion with Joan Allen when
she was handed a message: "Your brother Bruce called. Can't come
to the play tonight. Is buying Nabisco." In an essay for New
York Woman titled "Big Brother at Forty," Wendy writes
wistfully, "We travel in very different worlds, and in some ways
we've become enigmas to each other." For his part, Bruce says,
"Compared to most sibling relations, we're relatively close."
Virtually the only wall decorations in his office are three
posters for Isn't It Romantic.

    Early in Heidi, the heroine says in exasperation over male
self-confidence, "I was wondering what mothers teach their sons
that they never bother to tell their daughters." The playwright
is inordinately fond of that line, since it springs directly
from her own family experience. "God knows," she exclaims, "I'm
not going out to merge Nabisco. I stay in my house and write
plays." But judging from Wendy Wasserstein's triumph in writing
what may be the best play about her generation, there is much
to be said for what mothers teach their daughters.