Legacy Matters
From an appreciation by Peter Marks, The Washington Post.
Feminism has never exactly been thought of as a laugh riot, but somehow Wendy Wasserstein managed to locate its funny bone. Not by mocking it -- she was an ardent believer -- but by making the intoxicating, bewildering choices it presented to women a natural ingredient of the human comedy.
From her earliest efforts, such as "Uncommon Women and Others," to the mid-career triumph of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Heidi Chronicles" to such later, sardonic plays as "An American Daughter" and "Third," Wasserstein made her central subjects the question of what women of her generation wanted and the less facile realities of what they got.
--In person she could be bubbly, ingratiating, resolutely unglamorous. She had a pudding face, she was rumpled, her hair was often a twisting thicket of unruly curls, and there was a magnetism in her wit and lack of vanity. City-born and -bred, she seemed a quintessential product of New York, always running with the "in" theater crowd:
Ed Siegel in the Boston Globe.
''Her great strength as a playwright was to see how sadness and pathos lived side by side with happier moments in life. She was brilliant at writing that down. She was not so 'Neil Simon' as people like to pretend. . . . She was much closer to Chekhov."
Charles Isherwood in the New York Times
"She was known for being a popular, funny playwright, but she was also a woman and a writer of deep conviction and political activism," Mr. Bishop said. "In Wendy's plays women saw themselves portrayed in a way they hadn't been onstage before — wittily, 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."
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[From the Heidi Chronicles] Looking around at her materialistic, married, self-obsessed peers two decades after the exhilarating birth of feminism, Heidi observes: "We're all concerned, intelligent, good women. It's just that I feel stranded. And I thought the whole point was that we wouldn't feel stranded. I thought the point was that we were all in this together."
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"No matter how lonely you get or how many birth announcements you receive," a character says in "Isn't It Romantic," "the trick is not to get frightened. There's nothing wrong with being alone." The popularity of her work speaks for her ability to salve a little of that feeling of aloneness in her audiences with her deeply felt portraits of women — and occasionally men — seeking solidarity in their individuality, finding comfort in the knowledge that everybody else is sometimes uncomfortable with the choices they've made, too.