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Wendy Wasserstein, the Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who died Monday, "was very much like the women she wrote about," according to her longtime friend and colleague Andre Bishop, artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater. "She was witty, tender, warm and immensely popular. But she was also a deeply committed, deeply serious person."
Wasserstein was only 55 when she lost her battle with lymphoma, but as Bishop suggests, she earned many friends, fans and honors in her time on earth. Her breakthrough and signature effort, 1989's The Heidi Chronicles, premiered at Playwrights Horizons before transferring to Broadway, where it established Wasserstein as a beloved post-feminist icon -- someone who, Bishop recalls, "would be mobbed by women when I went out to dinner with her. They would say, 'Your plays mean so much to me; I feel like I've learned about my own life by reading you.'"
Like much of Wasserstein's work, Heidi addressed the experiences and aspirations of baby boomers who, like the playwright, struggled to achieve self-actualization in the wake of the women's movement and cultural upheaval of the 1960s. Tracing Heidi Holland's evolution from a student to an art history professor and single mother, Wasserstein examined the dreams, trials and sacrifices of such women.
In her most recent play, Third -- which premiered last year at Lincoln Center Theater, which has produced Wasserstein's work since Heidi -- the principal character also is a professor, and close to the author's age at the time it was introduced.
"My plays tend to be autobiographical," the Brooklyn-born Wasserstein acknowledged in an interview. In retrospect, they could even seem prophetic: A decade after Heidi, Wasserstein herself became a single mom, giving birth to a daughter, Lucy Jane. (Wasserstein chose not to disclose the father.) And the playwright drew on her family, which included brother Bruce Wasserstein, an investor and magazine owner.
Wasserstein's work also nurtured some of her generation's top actresses. Her first play to garner attention prior to Heidi, Uncommon Women and Others, was produced on PBS with a cast that included a young Meryl Streep, who had been a classmate of Wasserstein's at the Yale School of Drama.
Joan Allen played Heidi Holland on Broadway, and Jamie Lee Curtis assumed the role in a 1995 TV version, one of numerous teleplays that Wasserstein crafted. Christine Lahti, Allison Janney, Jennifer Aniston, Dianne Wiest, Jane Alexander, Kate Nelligan, Swoosie Kurtz and Madeline Kahn were among others for whom Wasserstein's scripts were showcases.
But those who worked with her stress that Wasserstein did more than document her own and other women's concerns.
"She was a marvelous playwright who wrote vital, important female characters and vital, important male characters," says James Bundy, dean of Yale's School of Drama, where Wasserstein premiered three early works between 1973 and 1975 and developed Uncommon Women. "Like many writers, she drew on personal experiences. But she was also a gifted observer of the human condition."
Bishop agrees. "If you said that Wendy was a feminist, she would say, 'I'm a humanist.' That (line)'s actually in The Heidi Chronicles. ... She managed to write from a very specific point of view for a very wide audience. And she had a wide variety of interests; she was committed in many areas."
Bundy notes that Wasserstein "spent much of her time as an advocate for young artists, and for taking young people to the theater."
To that end, Wasserstein founded Open Doors, a mentoring program for New York City high school students. She also served on the boards of the Educational Foundation of America, the School of American Ballet and the Council of the Dramatists Guild, among other groups. "She contributed to the American theater in a lot of other ways than being a gifted playwright," Bundy says.
Wasserstein's additional plays included Tony-nominated The Sisters Rosensweig, An American Daughter and Old Money. She wrote the books Bachelor Girls, Shiksa Goddess, Sloth and Pamela's First Musical, a children's book that she adapted into a stage musical, and many essays. She penned the libretto for the New York City Opera's Festival of Regrets and a new adaptation of The Merry Widow for the San Francisco Opera, and she contributed to a production of The Nutcracker for American Ballet Theatre. Her first novel, Elements of Style, is due in May.
Bishop allows that, for all her accomplishments, Wasserstein wasn't held by all in the kind of esteem that many felt she deserved. "Because her plays were so funny and popular, it wasn't always immediate to people what was behind them," he says.
"But I think that in years to come, she will be seen as a trailblazing artist. She was an amazing person as well as a great writer, and the two do not always go hand in hand, you know. She had a huge effect on people, and that's a tribute to her work and herself."
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