Writing ‘Bout Her Generation : Playwright Wendy Wasserstein taps into the witty, ironic, self-absorbed, confused essence of her contemporaries

NEW YORK —  Don’t get playwright Wendy Wasserstein started on all the stuff she sat through as a kid: “My parents took me to see ‘No Time for Sergeants,’ and there were hardly any girls in it. ‘Operation Petticoat’ was about these dumb girls in slips.”

Yale’s drama school was no better: “We were reading a lot of Jacobean dramas where men would kiss the lips of women, and then drop dead because of the poison. I thought this is all very interesting, but this doesn’t represent anyone I possibly know. I felt sort of left out.”

But not for long. Determined to see an all-women curtain call in the basement of the Yale School of Drama, in 1976 she wrote “Uncommon Women and Others” a witty memoir of her years at Mount Holyoke College. “Uncommon Women” went from a graduate thesis to Off Broadway, 2,000 college productions and the Public Broadcasting Service.

“Isn’t It Romantic,” written a few years later, is a funny but unsettling look at Wasserstein’s women as they deal with post-college decisions and insecurities. It fared well Off Broadway, in Los Angeles and elsewere.

Then came “The Heidi Chronicles,” a play about the choices and conflicts of 40ish baby-boomer Heidi Holland and her close friends. Set against a social backdrop of the past 20 years, the play brought 39-year-old Wasserstein both the 1989 Tony and the Pulitzer Prize. “Heidi,” which closed on Broadway a few weeks ago after 18 months, opens at the James A. Doolittle Theatre next Sunday, starring Amy Irving as Heidi.

Wasserstein’s success, and that of “The Heidi Chronicles,” thrusts smart contemporary women into the theatrical mainstream. People like Heidi Holland, says Wasserstein, are “serious, good people, often wry, and in some ways earnest. They are verbal and know what’s going on. And they’re also, interestingly enough, voices that have not been taken seriously in drama or film. They’re always the career gal or the wife or the daughter--supporting characters. They’re never the lead.

“Everyone’s so excited about ‘Postcards From the Edge’ because there’s an intelligent woman on the screen in the main role. It’s a shame that no one figured this out before--it’s educated women who buy tickets to cultural events.”

Wasserstein’s audiences hardly stop there, however. “She writes sophisticated people but the way she writes them, all sorts of people can relate to them,” says film producer Laurence Mark, now developing a movie with Wasserstein. “Wendy does not write Everyman. But for some reason, her plays touch Everyman.”

Wasserstein has said that until 1989, the only thing she’d ever won was a babka cake at a New Haven bakery, and friend and producer Andre Bishop calls Tony night “very nerve-wracking. Everyone said it was in the bag but you never know--Wendy and I spent most of the evening deciding if she won, should she go up with her shawl or not.”

That’s typical Wasserstein. Visit her large, airy Greenwich Village apartment, and she quotes a friend’s description of the place as “early young lady,” and credits Jeffrey, the cleaning person, with the stuffed animal groupings in her bedroom and the china display in the living room. Her cat Ginger, an ASPCA refugee, has her own bathroom, complete with a poster from the Japanese production of “Isn’t It Romantic.”

She writes in hotel rooms, libraries and restaurants--she rewrote scenes of “The Heidi Chronicles” at a 42nd Street coffee shop--but she also works at home. She moved her IBM typewriter into the dining room for a while last summer because it was the only air conditioned room, but usually she writes in her bedroom. She points out a small white table under the window, which is just inches from her unmade bed. “I work here,” she says, facing the table, “and then I lie down.”

Whether shepherding a reporter through her bedroom or offering shopping tips, she’s chatty, determinedly unpretentious and almost too eager to please. She moves back and forth between humor and seriousness, playing all the parts in a story, giggling constantly but listening attentively. She wants to be liked and one can’t imagine not liking her.

Even in her New York Woman column, says the magazine’s editor, Betsy Carter, “Wendy has a way of talking directly to you although writing for thousands of people. She’s more unguarded in her writing than in person, and there’s a lack of guile so that people think they know her. My mother has said she thinks Wendy would be so nice to have as a friend, and I think that’s how other people also feel about her.”

Carter says Wasserstein’s columns generate a great deal of mail, and so do her plays. The playwright’s dining room table is covered with mail--”I am Miss Mail,” she says with a wacky grin-- and she answers all of it. “I was always impressed with people who wrote thank-you notes.”

But quips like that also downplay her considerable success, and she’s acknowledged that being a celebrity isn’t easy when your favored position has been that of outsider. Even when she went back to Mount Holyoke for her honorary doctorate earlier this year, she says, “it was like I was in that old Judy Holliday movie, ‘It Should Happen to You’--basically I made my entire address to the C students.”

The outsider role is simply more familiar. Wasserstein has very often been the target of her own humor, a trait she acknowledges keeps people at a distance. She saw her first diet doctor when she was a sophomore in high school, has written of her “great fondness of all things dowdy,” and was a key player in a Mademoiselle article on one-time wallflowers.

“Part of Wendy’s persona was a wallflower at the party,” says friend and editor Carter. “But when you win the Tony and the Pulitzer in the same year, it’s hard to pull the wallflower act. When you’re a writer and you have your talent confirmed as she did, it has to change your sense of self.

“I was her escort when she won the Pulitzer,” says Carter. “The President of Columbia University pulled her up to the stage, and she stood there as he read (her award aloud). She told me later she went deaf the whole time and didn’t hear anything, but that’s Wendy. How much louder could the praise be?”

“The Heidi Chronicles” got its start with a $4,000 grant from the British-American Arts Assn. There was a reading at Playwrights Horizons and a workshop at Seattle Repertory Theatre, whose artistic director Daniel Sullivan directed the Broadway production and will do so again in Los Angeles. The show opened at Playwrights in 1988 before moving to Broadway the following March.

Even Wasserstein seems stunned by its commercial success. She refers to “Heidi” as “something I wrote for very personal reasons. It was not something I wrote thinking ‘I’ve got an idea for a boffo commercial play-- It’s about a feminist art historian who gets sad.’ ”

“Heidi” may have begun so simply, but it plays on a far larger canvas. As it portrays two decades in the lives of art historian Heidi, journalist Scoop and pediatrician Peter, it simultaneously sweeps in both the baby boom generation and the society that spawned it. It is a generation Wasserstein is so obsessed with that she could comfortably pluck material from “Isn’t It Romantic” to drop into “Heidi” and vice versa.

There’s plenty of Wasserstein in Heidi, but she also infuses chunks of herself in each of her characters. She loved becoming slick, aggressive journalist Scoop, for instance. “When you write plays, you get to be these people on some level, and that I got to be Scoop Rosenbaum was fabulous. I’ve grown up with the Scoops of the world-- them, I know intimately--so that was very empowering. People say Scoop is a villain, but I’d date him. I’d still date him--in a minute.”

As for Peter Patrone, the gay pediatrician who is Heidi’s lifetime friend: “I have a lot of gay friends. . . . A friend of mine was sick with AIDS and it was important to me to write a positive portrait of a gay man from a woman’s point of view and try to somehow relay that affection.”

Bishop recently reread Wasserstein’s plays in order to write about them, and says, “I was surprised because my memory of them on the stage was that the comedy ruled the day . . . (But) there’s also an underlying sadness to the plays and to her which, I think, is the appeal. I think there’s an underlying sadness to most people, no matter how bubbly they seem on the surface.”

The youngest of four children born to Eastern European immigrants, Wasserstein was raised first in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood, then on New York’s more prosperous Upper East Side. It was a family that stressed career and marriage.

Wasserstein’s sister, Sandra W. Meyer, is senior officer for corporate affairs at Citicorp. Her superstar brother Bruce Wasserstein is at investment bankers Wasserstein, Perella & Co., and her sister Georgette Levis owns an inn in Vermont. All except Wendy have had families.

Simon, the father in “Isn’t It Romantic” brings home a Russian cab driver he’ll maybe take into the family business should daughter Janie be interested in marrying him. And together her parents call writer Janie each morning singing “Sunrise, Sunset.” Asked how true to life Wasserstein’s characterizations are of their parents, her sister Sandra forces a smile: “Do my parents yearn for her to settle down? Yes, it’s there, but she exaggerates it.”

She likes to exaggerate: It’s dramatic. When she was at City College after graduating from Mount Holyoke, she turned out a play called “Any Woman Can’t,” which Wasserstein describes as the story of “‘a girl from Smith who came to New York and through fear made a bad marriage.” Not only did the play offer clues as to what would come next from Wasserstein, but its staged reading at Playwrights Horizons began a rich, professional relationship with that theater which continues today.

It also gave her the confidence to apply to the Yale School of Drama. Her Yale graduate thesis, “Uncommon Women” went through workshops at Playwrights and the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center’s National Playwrights Conference, then opened off-Broadway in November of 1977, with a cast including Glenn Close, Jill Eikenberry and Swoosie Kurtz. (That production was broadcast on PBS’ “Theatre in America” series in 1978, and rebroadcast last New Year’s Eve, with all but Close--who was replaced by Wasserstein’s Yale classmate, Meryl Streep.)

“Uncommon Women” is the tale of five college seniors in the ‘70s. At school and at a reunion lunch six years later, they talk about how they’ll all be “pretty amazing” at 30 or 40.

Those uncommon women, like Wasserstein, were caught in the maelstrom of the women’s movement. As she has said in several interviews, she went to college thinking you married a lawyer, was in school when it became fashionable to be a lawyer, and graduated when neither choice was clear.

Wasserstein, who jokes of a time when “having it all” meant getting a facial, shampoo and manicure, clearly thinks about such things a lot. So does writer Janie Blumberg, the protagonist of “Isn’t It Romantic” and so does art historian Heidi Holland. As friend Scoop warns Heidi at one point: “You ‘quality time’ girls are going to be one generation of disappointed women. Interesting, exemplary, even sexy, but basically unhappy.”

Wasserstein, who took the first woman’s history class at Mount Holyoke in 1970, says her plays, “very much exist because of feminism. . . . In terms of being a playwright or having confidence in my own voice--I think that comes a lot from going to a woman’s college and from coming of age during a feminist era.”

Because of what she has to say and her skill in saying it, Wasserstein has also become a frequent commentator on women’s issues at seminars and in the media. She is comfortable being a role model, she says--her sister Sandra says her college-age nieces greatly value the playwright’s advice--and worries aloud about the women who come after her.

How could she not? ‘I’m very much a humanist and maybe from the humanism comes the feminism as well. Feminism is not an argument--I don’t see how you make an argument not to be a feminist. How can you say that half the world’s population doesn’t have the rights of the other half because of their reproductive systems?”

Yet she is no wholesale supporter of feminism. In “The Heidi Chronicles,” for instance, there is a pivotal scene where Heidi goes back to address women at her alma mater and tells a long tale of personal discovery set in the locker room of a women’s gym. And at the end of the tale, she confesses she feels “stranded. And I thought the whole point was that we wouldn’t feel stranded. I thought the point was we were all in this together.”

As one might imagine, that isn’t the sort of remark that feminists enjoy hearing, and “Heidi” has become controversial both for its criticisms of the feminist movement and for its ending. “There are so few plays by women around, much less ones that go to Broadway, much less that deal with feminism, I think a lot of women come to ‘Heidi’ wanting it to be their story,” says producer Bishop. “If there were five plays by women on Broadway, that sort of intense scrutiny wouldn’t happen.”

What about her own choices? For one thing, she says again and again, it was not her plan to choose career over family. “I thought I’d marry a lawyer and maybe be a part-time I-don’t-know-what and choreograph plays at the Scarsdale Players.”

There has been a series of serious relationships, she says, and although she is not in a relationship now, she is seriously thinking about having a child. “I think you have to. I watch Amy Irving deal with acting and her children and it’s hard work. But I like children, and if I’m going to make a decision, I should make it now. I think if I do or don’t have one, I want it to be a decision I made and not a regret.”

“Isn’t It Romantic” is full of chicken jokes and other shtick, and Yale classmate Alma Cuervo feels Wasserstein’s humor has often made her work seem slighter than it actually is. Actress Cuervo, who played Wasserstein’s alter ego in both “Uncommon Women” and “Isn’t it Romantic,” says that at Yale, “I don’t think she was taken as seriously as the men there--(Christopher) Durang, (Ted) Tally--because of her sense of humor and (her subject matter). She wasn’t given her due.”

Bishop agrees. “Wendy’s had this problem, as all comedic writers do, because people think it’s facile and glib and easy but it isn’t,” says Bishop. “ ‘Isn’t It Romantic” is about a woman who defies her conventional upbringing, rejects her fiance and decides to pursue the life of a free spirit. The final image is of a woman dancing alone. It isn’t ‘Singin’ in the Rain.’ ”

Finally, with “Heidi,” Wasserstein’s talent has been widely acknowledged both critically and commercially. She’s been profiled in everything from People to Glamour, and her face is so familiar that strangers stop her on the street. There’s her byline on an interview with Yale classmate Streep in Interview magazine and on an op-ed piece in the New York Times. “Bachelor Girls,” a collection of her essays in New York Woman and elsewhere, was published earlier this year.

Has all the attention changed Wasserstein? “She’s gotten tougher,” says Carter of New York Woman. “She’s still funny but she doesn’t use it as a way to distance herself. She’s braver now and comes closer to the bone.”

That may be true, says Susan Gordis, one of three friends to whom “Bachelor Girls” is dedicated, but she feels Wasserstein hasn’t changed since they met at the Brooklyn Ethical Culture School 30 years ago. “People ask what is it like to be friends with a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and I say ‘I don’t know.’ I’m friends with Wendy,” says Gordis. “And Wendy is the same open, honest, unassuming person that she was at age 9.”

And Wasserstein? “I think in some ways it does make you more public. You get the sense of people saying, ‘well, what are you working on now ?’ and that’s hard to deal with. The serious side of me just wants to keep writing plays, and it doesn’t make it easier or harder to write if you’ve won these things--although maybe it changes things in terms of producing plays. I remember when I won the Pulitzer, Marsha Norman called me up and said ‘it’s like a rock; it’s something you can always hold onto.”

Most playwrights she knows work in TV, film and theater, says Wasserstein, and she’s done the same. After “Uncommon Women,” for instance, she “thought it would be a good idea to make money,” and adapted John Cheever’s “The Sorrows of Gin” for PBS starring Sigourney Weaver. About the same time, she wrote a half-hour sitcom about two women fork-lift operators (“like ‘The Honeymooners’ but from a woman’s point of view”) which did not take off.

There is a screenplay for ‘Isn’t It Romantic,’ which she says emerges every so often, and she’s now revising a “Heidi” screenplay for Savoy Pictures Entertainment. “Writing a screenplay is closer to writing a musical,” she says. “It’s more streamlined and you’re advancing the action.”

There are, of course, other benefits, like money and creature comforts. When she brought “Uncommon Women” to Los Angeles in 1978, she not only held auditions at producer/director Susan Dietz’s house in Sherman Oaks, but stayed there as well. Dietz booked her into a Hollywood area hotel for “Isn’t It Romantic” and so has the Center Theatre Group/Ahmanson for “Heidi.” But the movie people put her up at the Beverly Wilshire or Four Seasons.

Coming up is “The Object of My Affection,” a screenplay she wrote based on Stephen McCauley’s book. Producer Laurence Mark says it is tentatively scheduled to begin shooting in January, with James Bridges directing.

She’s writing a new play--all she’ll say is that “the people are a little older”--and may revive “Miami,” her “sort of autobiographical” musical about the relationship between a teen-age boy and his younger sister set during a family vacation in 1959.

She’ll go off and write after “Heidi” opens here, she says, but first, her 40th birthday is Oct. 18. While the Pulitzer makes turning 40 easier--”a lot easier”--she just wants the day over with. She’s made plans in New York, Paris, Nantucket and Toronto, plus considered getting on the Concorde, checking into a fine hotel “and weeping.” But what she’ll probably do is attend Playwrights Horizons’ Broadway opening of “Once on This Island,” whose producers, James Walsh and the Schubert Organization, also produced “Heidi.”

That’s because theater is family. It all became clear that day last year, she says, when she and director Sullivan had left Broadway’s Plymouth Theatre after Joan Allen’s final performance as Heidi. They said goodby to the cast, went out in the street and found it deserted because of an asbestos pipe break on 8th Avenue: “The only people on the street were men in white (protective) suits, and I said, ‘let’s go back to the Plymouth and put in the new cast.’ There was something to me so soothing about that--I thought if it was the end of the world, I would go running to a theater.”