PROFILE, Page 90Chronicler Of Frayed FeminismWENDY WASSERSTEIN, in her play The Heidi Chronicles, askshard questions about her generation, but her mother wouldprefer a grandchildBy 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
