Theatre

    When Wendy Wasserstein died in 2006, the American theatre industry did not only lose one of its greatest playwrights, but also a colleague for many and great friend as well. She was not only famous for her very humorous productions but was also a woman writer who had deep political conviction and activism. Throughout her theatre life, Wendy Wassersteins plays depicted a class of women heroines who were intelligent and successful but whose personal lives were also full of personal doubt. Her characters also appear to have been unlucky with finding love no matter how hard they tried to find it and their self-worth was also severely undermined by the frustrating reality that the lives of successful American women was still measured by their success in capturing the right male partners. Wassersteins personal life and her lack of success at romance was a running theme in her plays. For this great playwright and for her funs, humor was a successful antidote against lifes disappointment and also an avenue of releasing the anger that social and cultural inequalities often bring into peoples lives. From the time that Wendy Wassersteins theatre career commenced in 1977 and throughout her career, her plays struck an intense harmony with very many women whose lives involved a continuous struggle as they attempted to reconcile their desires for romance as well as companionship. According to Isherwood, the Lincoln Centre Theater artistic director Andre Bishop described Wassersteins work as follows, In Wendys plays, women saw themselves portrayed in a way they hadnt been onstage before  wittingly, intelligently and seriously at the same time. We take that for granted now, but it was not the case 25 years ago. She was a real pioneer. Wendy Wasserstein was hardworking and cared very much for the future of American theatre by personally investing her time and resources in the molding of young people for future theatre production. Her works included about a dozen plays, three nonfiction books and a novel and all played a very significant influence on how the American media depicted women in this society (Isherwood s 3-7).

Wendy Wassersteins Upbringing and Contribution to Theatre
   
    Wendy Wasserstein was born on October 18, 1950 in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish immigrants. She was the fifth and last child of Morris Wasserstein, a textile manufacturer and his wife Lora who was a house wife and amateur dancer. Her siblings included two sisters, Sandra and Georgette as well as two brothers namely Bruce and Abner. Wasserstein grew up in an upper middle-class background on the Upper East Side of Manhattan where her family had relocated to when she was 12 years old. Wasserstein is said to have used her family background better than any other playwright for acquiring stage material. She inherited her love for theatre from her mother who was a dance fanatic and had been taking dancing classes for the better part of her life. Like her daughter Wendy, Lola Wasserstein was a very funny and peculiar woman. Lola was also a mother quite different from others and is said to have been very detached from home-keeping. Morris Wassersteins income appeared to have been sufficient to support the family because Lola never cooked or did laundry. The Wasserstein family ate in restaurants or Lola had meals delivered to their residence, even if it was a whole Christmas feast. The children also enjoyed the privilege of being taken to Radio City Shows and when the young Wasserstein girl was growing up, a typical Saturday was spent at June Taylors Studio where she took dancing classes and later attended a Broadway matinee. Her mother Lola felt that exposing the young girl to the arts would give her a wide range of abilities or experiences. Wendys family was the kind in which there would always be something to amuse a visitor and her parents provided the kind of environment where their children felt that they could venture with their dreams as far as they desired. According to Craig, Wendys longtime buddy Betsy Carter once stated that, Wendy grew up in a complicated, smart, verbal family. The way she dealt with it was by becoming a brilliant observer (184). Wendy even went on to become the class commentator in her school (Isherwood  16 Craig 184).

    In her early years, Wasserstein attended Calhoun School, an all-girls institution and then proceeded to the elite Mount Holyoke College where she enrolled for a history major. In school, all the Wasserstein children were high fliers and Wendy, Sandra and Bruce all skipped grades a factor that left a mark on the young Wendy. She graduated in 1971 and returned to New York where she enrolled for an M.A program in creative writing at the City University of New York where she studied with other famous playwrights like Israel Horvitz and Joseph Heller. Wendy Wasserstein graduated in 1973 the same year that her first play entitled Any Woman Cant got an off-Broadway reading through Playwrights Horizons, a relatively small off-Broadway company. Her theatre career was to become closely linked with this company as well as to its artistic director Andre Bishop who also made the first production of her Wendys very famous play, The Heidi Chronicles. Wasserstein rejected an offer to join Columbia School much to her mothers disappointment and opted to join the prestigious Yale School of Drama where she wrote Uncommon Women and Others for her thesis. The play was based upon her own college experiences and the realization that women did not have any representation in theatre history. It proceeded on to become her first professional play. Wendy Wassersteins sister Sandra became one of the first American women to break into the prestigious field of senior corporate management. Her brother Bruce became a name in Americas world of investment banking while the other sister, Georgette, joined the hospitality industry in Vermont. All siblings except Wendy married and had nine children to them but their mother never appeared to be satisfied and still waited for a grandchild from her youngest child. Lola Wasserstein was very good at reminding Wendy about this fact and quickly passed on the news when another lady in the family became pregnant signaling that Wendy should follow the same trend. But it was Lola who had influenced her daughter so much that Wendy took a completely different direction in life from that taken by her siblings and became a theatre monster. Yet, Mrs. Wasserstein became overly upset when her young daughter joined Yale School of Drama to study playwriting instead of studying business at Columbia University. However, Wendy Wassersteins parents finally gave her the blessing due to the prestige tag that Yale had and with the hope that their young daughter would meet a lawyer or doctor to marry her. The fears of the uncertainty of life after drama school were also speaking loudly to Wendy but she moved on with her dream believing that it was a worthy risk to try and do what one really desired to do. Her colleagues at Yale include such other famous people as Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver and Christopher Durang, the later becoming so close to Wendy Wasserstein that she admitted that he was like a brother to her(Herrington 21 Craig 184-188).

    At Yale, Wendy Wasserstein never became fully comfortable largely due to the messages that she heard concerning women and theatre. She felt that women had been sidelined very much in theatre production and decided that she would do things differently by producing the exclusively women for women play, Uncommon Woman and Others, which was a nine-woman play in which a group of female friends steered each other graduation and onwards, into a world that had been altered so much by feminism. None of these characters was prepared for the obstacles and options that life in the outside world would bring along and by the time five of them reunited again, reality had drastically altered their personal expectations that the timetable of their lives must undergo some changes too. Being the first all-woman curtain called to be staged at Yale Drama School, Wendy Wassersteins play provoked considerable male resistance. Uncommon Women and Others moved from being just a reading at Playwrights Horizons to becoming an off-Broadway production at Phoenix Theatre in 19977. With the input of such uncommon actresses like Glenn Close and Schoosie Kurtz, the play received better reviews than any other play that Wendy produced by running for all the two weeks that it was showing. Its premature termination was due to disagreements about theatre space and the simple fact that male producers still had enough room for doubt regarding a play about women. The play ushered Wendy into her first major success in theatre and also created the breakthrough in the theatre careers of many actresses such as Meryl Streep, Glen Close and Swoosie Kurtz. PBS filmed and telecast the play on its Great Performances series. Wendy received a lot of encouragement from her mother and sister Sandra and more so from the many friends who had become like family to her (Craig 189 Isherwood s 16-17).   

    Although Wendy Wasserstein considered herself a humanist, her works depict some considerable amount of political expression often shrouded under some humor and the imagination that her views were purely feminist. She also recognized that sexual discrimination was still evident in society and that power feminism needed some activism as well as protective legislation. Wasserstein produced her works based on real life issues. In The Heidi Chronicles for example, the main character started off alone but somewhere in the course of her pursuit as a career artist, she became involved in protests against the lack of museum facilities for women artists. In her well known plays, Wendy Wassersteins female characters share a common characteristic they are all struggling with some very difficult personal as well professional decisions which are made even more difficult by the environmental changes that come with every with every new decade. The characters are torn between fulfilling their personal happiness through family life and pursuing ambitions through career fulfillment. These characters are a clear reflection of Wendys own relationship with the womens movement during its thirty years of development. The plays are a beautiful exploration of the conflicts that take place between personal satisfactions and career ambition and clearly reflect the changing social and cultural positions that women have to put up with.  Feminism is not necessarily the major topic in the plays but the way they treat women makes them woman-conscious. For the main characters, Wendy intelligently chose strong, well educated, intelligent upper class and often Jewish women. Such women shared her convictions and frustrations with the social situations that women of her generation found themselves in and it was for this very reason that the playwright has often been referred as the voice of her generation. Many of the characters in Wendys plays can be traced back to her own upbringing, family, college life and friends. The author especially identified with such characters as Heidi Holland and Janie Blumberg who shared her conflicts and perceptions. These characters reflect Wendys questions, her thoughts and hesitations as well as the various opinions and observations that she observed from the political and cultural climate of her time. Through the character of Heidi, Wendy artistically examined the trials, sacrifices and dreams of single women struggling with careers and motherhood. As The Heidi Chronicles comes to a close, Heidi becomes a single parent. Ten years after producing Heidi, Wendy became a single mother to her daughter Lucy Jane who was born in 1999 when the author was at an advanced age of 49 and after trying fertility drugs for a long time. Like Wendy, these characters regard themselves as outsiders. In her most recent play, Third, Wendys characters were also advanced in age and the lead character was a professor whose age was close to the authors by the time the play was produced. Wendy Wassersteins plays can be read in the background of the 1960-1990 feminist movement (Herrington 2, 17-21 Gardner s 3-5). In Wendy Wassersteins The Sisters Rosenweig, Sara the oldest sister is a corporate bank executive like Sandra and the middle sister has the name gorgeous which is similar to Wendys sisters name, Georgette. The youngest of the sisters in the play takes Wendys character by being a playwright and being resistant when it comes to matters relating to marriage. In Shiksa Goddess or How I Spent My Forties, Wendy shares personal thoughts and experiences such as the art of aging, state of the arts, birth of her daughter and the death of her sister (Craig 196).

    Politics, Religion and ethnicity issues also formed another theme in Wendy Wassersteins plays. In The Sisters Rosenweig, three sisters find themselves differing over their different approaches to their Jewish roots. The play ran for 586 performances after opening on Broadway in 1993 and received a nomination for best play in the Tony Award a first time for the solo prize to be won by a woman. But her 1997 play titled, Am American Daughter which was inspired by the harsh criticism directed towards women in politics did not realize much success because it ran for only 89 performances. Wendy however later took it up for television show. She also produced other plays Off-Broadway such as Isnt It Romantic, Old Money and the more recent Third. The Heidi Chronicles remains Wendys most popular and celebrated play having ran for 622 performances after opening on Broadway in 1989. Besides the Pulitzer Prize, the play also collected best play awards from the New York Drama Critics Circle and Tony Award. It also won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and a Drama Desk Award. The author admitted that the success associated to this play not only boosted her morale personally but also gave her a personal hard ct to emulate. Wendy Wassersteins other writings include Sloth, some self-help literature published by Oxford University Press in 2005 and two books on the essays Bachelor Girls and Shiksa Goddess published by Knopf Books in 1990 and 2001 respectively. She also contributed to children literature with her book Pamelas First Musical which became a stage performance through the combined efforts of David Zippel and Cy Coleman. Wendy also wrote the one act opera The Festival of Regrets and a novel entitled Elements of Style which was published by Knopf in 2006. This famous woman playwright is also hailed for writing the words for the Festival of Regrets at the New York City Opera and the San Francisco Operas new adaptation of the Merry Widow. She also made tremendous contributions to the production of The Nutcracker, a production which was staged at the American Ballet Theatre (Isherwood s 20-22 Craig 192-194 Gardner 12).

    Although Wendy Wasserstein made great contributions to writing, stage remained her deepest affection and all aspects of her life were spread through the theater. Wendy helped to shape the lives of several upcoming theatrics by teaching playwriting at several universities. In 1998, she also personally established a program that would reach out to the smart but less privileged students in New York and assist them to pursue a theater career. Currently, the program is run by the Theater Development Fund under the name Open Doors and caters for over 100 students chaperoned by different interested mentors. Yale Drama School graduates such as Meryl Streep, Joan Allen, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jennifer Aniston, Christine Lahti, Allison Janney, Jane Alexander, Madeline Khan, Dianne Wiest, Swoosie Kurtz and Kate Nelligen among others cannot deny that Wendy Wasserstein nurtured and helped bring to maturity, their successful theatre careers. James Bundy, the man who was dean of students at Yale Drama School when Wasserstein was student and one who also witnessed her production of Uncommon Woman and Others, is said to have described her as a marvelous playwright. He hailed her for writing vital and important female and male characters. Although her works were similar to those of many writers in that she drew on her personal experiences, Wasserstein was also a very gifted observer of human conditions. Her broad variety of interests saw her serve on various boards such as the Council of the Dramatists Guild (CDGE), Educational Foundation of America (EFA) and School of American Ballet (SAB) among others (Gardner s 6-11).

    Wendy Wasserstein also made great contributions to the film industry including The Object of my Affection which starred Jennifer Aniston. Theatre however remained her inbounding love and she wrote many drafts before making a final script to ensure that the work was excellent. She rarely made changes to a completed play except on few cases like the amendment of An American Daughter. Also included in her writings were comedic plays like Old Money. Wendy loved humor and applied it in the characters in her plays. As stated by Craig, Wendy is said to have expressed her love for humor thus, Because one, it makes one entertaining two it deflects.Also, it helps you deal with things which are overwhelmingly tragic. She tried to balance the darker and lighter issues of life and felt that comedy was one way of balancing this because of its ability to hide pain as well as reveal it. Regarding comedy, Craig quoted Wendy as follows, I believe in comedy, in its spirit, in its ability to lift people off the ground (197-201). In the plays and essays that Wendy wrote, she challenged the popular assumption that there can only be one right type of life or family. For Wendy, there were different kinds of lives to be lived at different time set-ups (Craig 197-205).

    Beginning from the 1970s to 2006 when Wendy Wasserstein succumbed to cancer, she actively participated in Americas regional theatre movement. Throughout her career, she was pre-occupied with the re-imagination and reconsideration of the lives of women whether real or imaginary. Even after the birth of her daughter, Wendy still continued with an active theatre career and spent time between caring for Lucy as well as for her aged parents besides producing the stage version of Pamelas First Musical. Whatever form her various writings took, Wendy Wassersteins literary work was so full of humor that she became a darling of many people. Her plays were so humorous and popular that it took some time for people to deduce the theme behind the acts. The plays also reflected Comic situations, a lot of dialogue and anxiety-ridden reflections and moments of what could be or may have been the outcome of particular situations. She had deep friendships within the theatrical community as well as out of it and she devoted her time and resources for the benefit of all. Her greatest contribution to theatre was through the tremendous writing she has done for the stage. Although her work was laced with a lot of comedy, it gave her the freedom to deeply explore into the lives of the American women that she was writing about. Theatre was a product of her childhood and it defined the rest of her life. She will be remembered for artistically and successfully and ushering in the role of the woman into the theatre industry (Herrington 45-46 Isherwood 16-24 Craig 192-194).