Contemporary American Playwrights - Wendy Wasserstein

  Wendy Wasserstein Tom Stoppard has remarked that there is ‘a deep suspicion among serious people of comic situations. The point is that good fun is merely frivolous.’ Attacked by Edward Bond for being ‘a clown in a charnel house’, he was seen by some as unwilling to take seriously those issues which they saw as critical to the moment. Of his own work he remarked ironically, ‘I used to have a redeeming streak of seriousness . . . and now I have a redeeming streak of frivolity.’ 1 In fact, Stoppard has, through- out his career, been a moralist and if he has admitted to a lack of inter- est in either plot or character, on occasion switching lines from one character to another, he has been concerned to question the nature and extent of human freedom and (in Night and Day, Hapgood and The Invention of Love) the centrality of love. The fact that he is equally dedicated to humour should not deceive us into believing that he lacks moral concern. Though Wendy Wasserstein comes from another tradition she shares both his confessed disabilities (also admitting to weaknesses of plot and, like Stoppard, transposing lines) and his wit, while suffering the same sus- picions. She, too, if equally ironically, could claim that she has moved from seasoning comedy with seriousness to redeeming seriousness with wit. Certainly the gag-a-minutedelivery of Uncommon Women and Others and Isn’t It Romantic gives way to the more measured ironies of The Heidi Chronicles, The Sisters Rosensweig and An American Daughter. But where in England Stoppard could justifiably claim to be part of the mainstream, with Bond perhaps representing a more European strain, Wendy Wasserstein seems torelate toa history of comedy that invites audiences tosee her as a vaude- villian, a Jewish comic, anxious to please, according to her critics, by dis- avowing the very principles that generate her subject matter. In many ways comedy is a central tradition of British, and, indeed, Irish drama. From Wycherley and Farquhar through Wilde and Coward  1 Paul Delaney, ed., Tom Stoppard (Ann Arbor, MI, ), p. . to Beckett, Pinter and Stoppard, humour has been a definitional mark. Much the same could be said of the novel, beginning with Tristram Shandy. In America things seemed somewhat different. The moral seri- ousness which drove The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick and, later, the work of Dreiser, London, Hemingway, Faulkner and Mailer, seemed to be matched in the theatre at first by the moral absolutism of melodrama and then by the tragic sensibility of O’Neill, Hellman, Miller and Williams. Comedy, meanwhile, it appeared, was spun off as a separate element, with its own history and development. From the days of min- strelsy and vaudeville to Broadway hits, it was frequently populist in tone and often ethnic in origin. It is a neat opposition, and with some element of truth, but even in its broad outlines difficult to sustain, whether we are talking of the novel – which incorporates the subtle ironies of Hawthorne and James, the satire of Lewis, the moral comedy of Bellow or the bizarre humour of Heller, Vonnegut and DeLillo – or of drama itself. George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, Philip Barry and Neil Simon are not best viewed as aberrant to the mainstream while comedy is as central to Miller’s work as a sense of the tragic. Neither he nor Tennessee Williams wrote many plays that could be called comedies – though both tried their hand at them – but a sense of the comic was vital to them, as it is for David Mamet and Sam Shepard, for Lanford Wilson and John Guare. Beyond that, the impact of the absurd, in the s and s, seems to have inspired an entire generation to explore the affecting power of a disjunc- tive humour. There were few new writers who did not confess their debts to Beckett and Pinter. Given the composition of America, meanwhile, it was always likely that ethnicity would play a more significant role than it did, for the most part, in Britain (music hall aside) and, indeed, Jewish humour has pro- vided an essential ingredient of what is surely a comic tradition in American writing. Meanwhile, a surprising number of the women play- wrights who emerged in the s and s chose comedy as their prin- cipal mode: Maria Irene Fornes, Beth Henley, Tina Howe, Adrienne Kennedy, Rochelle Owens. Wendy Wasserstein has said that she writes ‘serious plays that are funny’. 2 What is interesting about her work, according to the author Wendy Wasserstein  2 Jackson R. Bryer, The Playwright’s Art: Conversations with Contemporary American Dramatists (New Brunswick, NJ, ), p. . herself, ‘is that they are comedies, but they are also somewhat wistful. They’re not happy, nor are they farces.’ 3 There is, she insists, ‘an under- current in my work’ (Betsko and Koenig, Interviews,p.). Indeed, she has suggested that ‘you can go deeper being funny . . . I think that if you’re writing character, comedy is humane’ (Bryer, The Playwright’s Art, pp. –). As to an ethnic quality in her work, she is equally clear about this. Asked by Jackson Bryer whether a Jewish identity and a Jewish cultural upbringing informed her work, she replied, ‘Oh, very much so . . . in terms of humor . . . and in terms of pathos, too’, though she has also expressed the suspicion that the success of The Heidi Chronicles may have in part been due to the fact that the central character was ‘a Gentile girl from Chicago. It wasn’t about Wendy with the hips from New York, even if Wendy with the hips from New York had the same emotional life’ (Bryer, The Playwright’s Art,p.). She has spoken of being raised on Jewish comics and of suspecting that her sense of community, melan- choly and spirituality can be traced back to her experience of temple. She is aware, too, of having, at various stages in her life, been a Jew amongst non-Jews, a fact that has perhaps given her a double perspec- tive from which some of her humour derives. She is, like Holly Kaplan in Uncommon Women and Others, a spectacle and a spectator, part of the world which she explores, drawing heavily on autobiographical material, but also an observer. Wendy Wasserstein was born in Brooklyn in . Her mother grew up in Poland and was an amateur dancer while she herself took dancing lessons from teachers who performed on the Jackie Gleason Show: ‘I grew up with chorus girls, and it was show biz’ (Bryer, The Playwright’s Art, p. ). Her grandfather wrote Yiddish plays and her parents regularly took her to the theatre. Her father, however, was the owner of a textile store who, like the father of Holly in Uncommon Women and Others (the character which Wasserstein based on herself) invented ‘velveteen’. She had something of a privileged upbringing. The family moved to the Upper East Side of Manhattan when she was eleven and she went to a series of girls’ schools before attending university at Mount Holyoke, in Massachusetts, where she enrolled in the first feminist course on offer in this essentially conservative institution. She confesses to having hated it. Her own femininism was of a different kind, developing out of an  Contemporary American playwrights 3 Kathleen Betsko and Rachel Koenig, Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights (New York, ), p. . interest in women’s language and relationships rather than gender poli- tics: ‘being a writer who has come of age as a woman, you have had a very different language, you have had a very different experience. My plays are generally about women talking to each other. The sense of action is perhaps different than if I had come of age as a male play- wright’ (Bryer, The Playwright’s Art,p.). Distrusting the label ‘feminist’, and attracting a critical response from feminists accordingly (particu- larly for The Heidi Chronicles), she has chosen to explore women’s lives and concerns without adopting prescriptive models. Indeed, to some degree her comic approach implies a sense of detachment and irony of a kind seldom found in feminist accounts or gender theory. On leaving Mount Holyoke, she took a writing course at City College in New York with Joseph Heller and Israel Horovitz, having her first play, Any Woman Can’t, about a girl from Smith College who makes a bad marriage, read at Playwrights Horizons at the YMCA on nd Street in . The relationship with Playwrights Horizons was to prove a lasting one. Meanwhile she applied simultaneously to Columbia Business School and the Yale School of Drama, still uncertain where her future lay, finally settling for the latter. At Yale, however, she felt nervous, indeed ‘frightened to death’, as she has explained, not least because she remained unconvinced of the legitimacy of the enterprise to which she had committed herself. Playwriting, more especially for women, did not seem a secure and sensible road on which to set one’s feet. Certainly the Yale class was described by her fellow student Christopher Durang as ‘bizarre macho’, a reading of her play Uncommon Women and Others proving alien to at least one of its members. Ironically, her earlier play, Any Woman Can’t, involved a young woman struggling to achieve inde- pendence in a male-dominated world, a subject to which she returned after Happy Birthday, Montpelier Pizz-zazz, a play about the college party scene and a comic book exploration of male–female relations. Uncommon Women and Others, written as part of her academic require- ments and first produced at Yale in , was by far the most successful of these early plays. The assumption in the theatre, she has remarked, was that the pain in the world was male pain and that women could only write ‘small tragedies’. But if women wrote ‘small tragedies’ they were, in her words, ‘our tragedies, and therefore large, and therefore legitimate’ (Betsko and Koenig, Interviews,p.). And while Uncommon Women and Others was not offered as a tragedy of any size it was, in its thematic con- cerns and, indeed, in its mere existence, an assertion of the significance Wendy Wasserstein  of women, of the legitimacy of their anxieties and hopes, and of the power, irony and wit of their language. Assumptions about the primacy of male stories did not only typify the history of American drama, however, nor even simply the ethos of Yale, where the two principal teachers were Robert Brustein and Richard Gilman. She recalls, too, the sense of irrelevance that she felt in study- ing Jacobean drama, in which women were often the source of corrup- tion, and her feelings on seeing posters for the film Deliverance, a violent film about male relationshionships in which women played no role. Accordingly, she decided to write a play in which all the characters were women, a play whose politics lay essentially in that gesture. As she has said, ‘It’s political because it’s a matter of saying, “You must hear this.” You can hear it in an entertaining fashion, and you can hear it from real people, but you must know and examine the problems these women face’ (Betsko and Koenig, Interviews,p.). In truth this description implies a sharper political edge than is appar- ent in the play. The fact is that earlier versions were rather more direct. Based on her own time at Mount Holyoke, it had originally allowed the radicalism of that period to bleed into the text. This was, after all, the time of the killings at Kent State, when National Guardsmen opened fire on protesting students, the time of the bombing of Cambodia and, as she has recalled, the opening up of male colleges to women students, a side issue whose ramifications were nonetheless significant in terms of transforming America. But, as Uncommon Women and Others makes plain, another version of America, and of university education for women, was still in place. America might be undergoing radical change but women were presented with models of themselves that offered no space for such change. They were still being groomed for a world in which manners, social proprieties, secure careers and bankable marriages played their part. The original version, however, allowed the wider world to intrude. It had included a speech calling for a strike over Vietnam, following the visit of a radical activist. This was excised as a distraction, Wasserstein fearing that the question of Vietnam itself would destabilise a drama which she wished to focus on women’s voices. And, indeed, it is hard to see how her comedy, which deliberately sets out to capture as well as utilise an undergraduate humour, would have sat beside this more potent and disturbing issue, though by the time of the play’s first professional production, in , something of the sting had undoubtedly gone out of that.  Contemporary American playwrights Uncommon Women and Others was offered to a string of theatres and rejected before finding a home at the Marymount Manhattan Theatre in a Phoenix Theatre production in . After a short run it closed without transferring to Broadway when a producer requested a revised ending. It was, however, televised by PBS the following year and revived in New York in . The play is set in a restaurant in the s and, six years earlier, in the college living room of what is clearly Mount Holyoke. A group of women who had graduated together now meet for a reunion. Having set themselves to achieve their goals by the age of thirty they confront what time has made of them and they of time. The published text of the play begins with a series of elaborate char- acter notes that take us beyond anything dramatised, fleshing out what we never quite see. Hence, we are told of Rita Altabel that when she ‘walked through the Yale Cross Campus Library with the Yale Crew Team’ she ‘had cowbells on her dress’, that she ‘refuses tolive down to expectations’ but ‘shouldn’t worry about it’ because her ‘imagination would never let her down’. 4 And what is true of this character is equally true of the others. It is as if Wasserstein wished to fill in some of the gaps in her episodic play, as if, given her love for witty dialogue, she wanted to grant her characters the very depth which they refuse, choosing, as they do, to regard life as no more than an occasion for jokes, a fact acknowl- edged by her own notes, which describe Muffet as ‘wry’, which note Holly’s ‘wit’ and Samantha’s ‘closet wit’. Even Mrs Plumm, housemother of Stimson Hall, is partly defined by her power to inspire laughter. The episodic structure, meanwhile, which Wasserstein believes she may in part owe to years of television viewing, underscores her empha- sis on character rather than story, on language rather than action. In some senses the play is like a series of revue sketches, with seventeen scenes. Believing that she is ‘not that good at storytelling’, Wasserstein suggests that the episodic nature of this and other plays, together with their humour, enabled her to compensate for what otherwise might seem a deficiency: ‘I’ve always thought that if I kept the language bright enough and the comedy bright enough no one could tell nothing’s hap- pened!’ (Bryer, The Playwright’s Art,p.). The college is in transition. Mrs Plumm presides over a ritual described as ‘Gracious Living’, which involves afternoon tea and candle- light dinners in hostess gowns, while the students take an altogether Wendy Wasserstein  4 Wendy Wasserstein, Uncommon Women and Others (New York, ), p. . more direct view of life, discussing sex, plotting their careers and, in the case of Rita Altabel, and despite her possession of a DAR scholarship (Daughters of the American Revolution), devising a unique version of feminism that requires her to taste her own menstrual blood, an opera- tion somewhat removed from tasting Mrs Plumm’s finger sandwiches with Earl Grey tea. Still part of a world in which women are, according to the Man’s Voice which prefaces many of the scenes, ‘part-time mothers, part-time workers, part-time cooks, and part-time intellectuals’ (Uncommon Women,p.), they are caught at a moment of change. When a class on women’s history, involving study of suffragettes, sexual poli- tics, the feminine mystique and Rosie the Riveter, is interrupted by a student waving petits fours and announcing that sexuality is more impor- tant than intellect, only Holly and Rita protest and that by snatching the petits fours.As Muffet Dinicola, another student, remarks, ‘Sometimes I know who I am when I feel attractive. Other times it makes me feel very shallow like I’m not Rosie the Riveter.’ Indeed, she is inclined to see men as more interesting than women and the new role offered to her by fem- inists confusing: ‘I just don’t know why suddenly I’m supposed to know what I want to do’ (p. ). The tension between love and career, in Uncommon Women and Others, is a central tension in Wasserstein’s plays and the source of much of her humour. Part of the feminist animus against Wasserstein lies precisely in her mocking of feminist assumptions and language. Rita expounds her theory of the sexual basis of architecture – ‘this society is based entirely on cocks’ (p. ) – Kate and Leilah discuss clitoral orgasms, while Holly invests in a diaphragm as the price of entry to a liberated existence. What they do not do is take feminism seriously. Marriage and sex are the dominant topics. Germaine Greer and Simone de Beauvoir are the sub- jects of jokes. Men, pursued, derided or admired, are at the centre of their attention. Apart from a series of vaudeville one-liners, Wasserstein generates her humour out of character, as Kate’s single-minded careerism comes up against Carter’s self-effacing inner-directedness, Rita’s masculinised directness breaks over Samantha’s sentimentality. Holly, meanwhile, based on Wasserstein herself, seems to be a model for that overweight, Jewish, defensively witty figure, with an overwhelming mother, who was to reappear in Isn’t It Romantic. Wasserstein also creates comic effect out of juxtaposition. When what is described as a Man’s Voice announces that the college ‘fosters the ability to accept and even welcome the necessity of strenuous and sus-  Contemporary American playwrights tained effort in any area of endeavor’ (p. ), Rita, wearing a denim jacket and cap and mimicking a man’s voice, says, ‘Hey, man wanna go out and cruise for pussy?’ (p. ). When the same Voice observes that the college ‘places at its center the content of human learning and the spirit of systematic disinterested inquiry’ (p. ), Kate asks Holly: ‘did you ever have penis envy?’ (p. ). Yet, while distrusting schematised feminism and programmatic aca- demic courses in women’s studies, while committing herself more fully to humour than political statement, Wendy Wasserstein does celebrate what seems to be a transitional generation. The Man’s Voice, at Commencement, may announce that ‘By the time a class has been out ten years, more than nine-tenths of its members are married’ with many of them devoting ‘a number of years exclusively to bringing up a family’, or working ‘as Girl Friday for an Eastern Senator, service volunteer in Venezuela, or assistant sales director of Reader’s Digest’(Uncommon Women, p. ), but that Voice then fades into that of another, a woman, who acknowledges the obstacles thrown in the path of women, observing that ‘Society has trained women from childhood to accept a limited set of options and restricted levels of aspiration’ (p. ). The action then moves forward in time so that the play both begins and ends with the former undergraduates, now seen six years after grad- uation. The distance they have or have not travelled is thus a measure of the significance of the gender shift between the male and female Voice. The near-catatonic Carter has had her movie on Wittgenstein, planned at college, shown on Public Television. Leilah has married a Muslim, Rita and Kate (after a failed relationship) are in analysis, Muffet, who prides herself on being self-sufficient, is an insurance seminar hostess. The radical feminist Rita, meanwhile, is married to Timmy, a wealthy man, and is jointly suing his mother for her stocks. Samantha is married and pregnant but confesses to being intimidated into silence and feeling inferior to her former friends, who she imagines still celebrate the idea of independence and a professional life. Holly, meanwhile, is still poised in hesitation, still receiving calls from her mother asking, ‘Are you thin, are you married to a root canal man . . .?’ She is still, she confesses, ‘in transition’ (p. ), maintaining her options. The play ends as they announce their need for one another and their continuing potential – ‘We knew we were natural resources before anyone decided to tap us’ (p. ). But for all that they go their separate ways again. The projects, great and small, are now deferred (Rita’s novel is not yet written, or even started) and where they are achieved seem to Wendy Wasserstein  leave a residue of discontent (Kate is a successful businesswoman who longs for a child and, on the basis of no available evidence, insists that she is now a feminist). Those lengthy descriptions offered by Wasserstein at the beginning of the play no longer seem to apply, no longer accu- rately locate these women who imagined the future which she now allows them to inhabit. Where once they believed they would realise their potential by the age of twenty-five or thirty, they are now obliged to push the date on to some indefinite future. The final speech is given to the one-time feminist. Its ironies retrospec- tively define the tone of the play: Timmy says when I get my head together, and if he gets the stocks, I’ll be able to do a little writing. I think if I make it to forty I can be pretty amazing. (She takes Holly’s hand) Holly, when we’re forty we can be pretty amazing. You too Muffy and Samantha, when we’re (Rita pauses for a moment) . . . Forty-five we can be pretty fucking amazing. (p. ) The ‘Timmy says’, together with the pause before the last sentence, are a measure of her and their failure to fulfil their hopes, to realise their dreams. The final stage direction may indicate that they exit with their arms around each other, but there is no suggestion that the solidarity of which they once spoke, or even the sentimental and nostalgic affection they still feel for one another, will now have the power to transform their lives. It is true that the world of ‘Gracious Living’ has gone for ever, that tea and finger sandwiches need never again define the limits of their pos- sibilities or define the style of their lives, but in their place has come not the confident balance between private needs and public lives they had thought would be a consequence of changing times, but confusion, contradiction and disappointment. Despite Samantha’s pregnancy, none of the women has had children. Careers, Kate’s aside, have not taken off. Life is on hold and seems likely to remain there. The women’s movement, meanwhile, exists only on the fringe of their lives. Thus Rita, in thrall to her wealthy husband, and six years after her declared alliance to the feminist cause, announces that ‘I’m really getting into women’s things. I’ve been reading Doris Lessing’ (p. ) (a decade and a half late), while Holly announces her hatred for the movement on the grounds that an article sent to Ms magazine was returned with a note saying that she ‘was a heretic to the sisterhood’ (p. ). The real feminism of Uncommon Women and Others lies not in the lives of the characters but the fact of the play. The very sense of community, of sisterhood, which they alternately mock and yearn for, and which the  Contemporary American playwrights vicissitudes of life, the competing privacies of experience, have eroded, survives triumphantly in the on-stage ensemble. This is a play of women’s voices, of characters observing and acting out women’s percep- tions and needs. It is a successful demonstration of what the play itself seems to despair of finding, a sense of unity and solidarity in which the individual gains meaning from the group. When Wasserstein returned to Mount Holyoke, in , to see a pro- duction of the play, she was surprised to discover that far from seeing it as an innovative attempt to present a group of women working out their attitudes to a changing world, the students regarded it as an amusing period piece. Themselves clear as to their plans, whether for work or marriage, they regarded Uncommon Women as a study of women who were uncommon in quite a different way from that which the playwright intended. For Wasserstein, however, such a response seemed less like the emergence of the new woman than a reversion to the s. Certainly these women undergraduates had yet to step outside the university to discover the confusions that she was herself to address in Isn’t It Romantic. Wendy Wasserstein was the first woman playwright from the Yale drama school effectively to make her mark and she did so with a play whose cast was, with the exception of a single male Voice, entirely female. Indeed, the sight of an all-woman cast taking a bow at Yale gave her immense pleasure and seemed, to her, of considerable symbolic significance, not least because her own description of herself at that time matched precisely Holly’s situation in the play. She was, she has explained, uncertain of herself or her direction, unsure, like many of her characters, whether she had made a wrong decision about her present and hence her future. Uncommon Women and Others was not the only product of . She col- laborated with another Yale student, Christopher Durang, to create When Dinah Shore Ruled the Earth, which included an outlandish beauty contest featuring, among others, a faculty wife, a white ‘black lesbian mother’ and a woman poet. The loose structure enabled the writers to address and generally satirise a number of subjects, from motherhood and marriage to feminism and work. But her next success outside the environs of Yale, and following the  production of Uncommon Women and Others, was Isn’t It Romantic, presented by Playwrights Horizons, in New York, in December, . At the centre of the play is the figure of Janie Blumberg, confused about life and harassed by her parents – Tasha and Simon Blumberg – who Wendy Wasserstein  [...]... aerobics class to dropping off one child at the draw-with-computers class and the other at swimming-for-giftedchildren, before preparing ‘grilled mesquite free-range chicken with balsamic vinegar and sun-dried tomatoes’ (p ) for her investmentbanker husband and calling her twenty-two-year-old, squash-playing, would-be lover This brilliantly free-form aria, which offers an account of lives that have... withdrawing her nomination 10 Wendy Wasserstein, ‘An American Daughter’, American Theatre, (September ), p   Contemporary American playwrights Wasserstein has said that, ‘In some ways Morrow’s right about privilege, selective privilege – why don’t you have to answer that jury notice?’ (‘An American Daughter’, p ) Indeed she saw this as a problem affecting the then-current Clinton administration:... ‘a Wendy Wasserstein  reaction to turning forty-two – to midlife decisions, to not having children’ It was, she insisted, ‘both personal and political’ and it was ‘a darker play than The Sisters Rosensweig’ or The Heidi Chronicles (Winder, Wendy Wasserstein , p ) At the heart of the play is the figure of Lyssa Dent Hughes, public health administrator, professor of public health, forty-two-year-old... taken by a generation who have tried to re-invent the world they inhabit and the relationships which go some way to defining the nature of that world Believing, as good Americans, that history is progress, that the passage of time will edge them in the direction not 8 Wendy Wasserstein, The Sisters Rosensweig (New York, ), p   Contemporary American playwrights simply of change but perfectibility,... psychological development Thus the Heidi who a moment before we saw following 6 Wendy Wasserstein, The Heidi Chronicles (New York, ), p   Contemporary American playwrights the egregious Scoop Rosenbaum, is now shown attending, albeit with more than a little scepticism, a women’s support group dominated by a foul-mouthed lesbian Janis Joplin’s ‘Take a Piece of My Heart’ gives way to Aretha... refused to conform to familiar models, then Heidi is herself unsure what it is she 7 Philip C Kolin and Colby H Kullman, Speaking on Stage: Interviews with Contemporary American Playwrights (Tuscaloosa, AL, ), p   Contemporary American playwrights requires of the men in her life Their privacies are as closed to her as hers seem to be to them As the second act continues, Scoop’s marriage is... mercilessly satirised by Wasserstein In fact the group consists of nothing more than Fran, who wears army fatigues and a chip on her shoulder, Jill, a forty-year-old mother immaculately dressed in a pleated skirt, who dispenses what she calls ‘goodies’ (to which Fran responds: ‘‘‘Goodies?” Jill, we’re not the fuckin’ Brownies’) (The Heidi Chronicles, p ), a naive seventeen-year-old and Heidi, with... an oncologist, is African -American and Jewish Struggling to have a child by fertility treatment, she is professionally and privately concerned with matters of life and death Her achievements as a surgeon, along with Lyssa’s impending political appointment, make them seem symbols of feminist achievement, but the next generation of feminists, represented by twenty-seven-year-old Quincy Quince, are inclined... daughter She is, Wasserstein insists, ‘very American A good mother, a hard worker’ (Betsko and Koenig, Interviews, p ) What she is not is a model Wasserstein can endorse, as Harriet, with her MBA and executive lover, a life of high achievement and no meaning, follows in her footsteps becoming equally modern, equally American, and equally empty Janie’s mother, by contrast (modelled closely on Wasserstein s... summarise the structure of Wasserstein s own drama The danger implicit in that parallel in part explains the attacks on her work by those who insisted that it was Wendy Wasserstein  not in her comedy alone that she failed to take seriously the issues which she treats There is a price to be paid for being an observer and it is paid both by Heidi within the play and by Wasserstein outside of it There . developing out of an  Contemporary American playwrights 3 Kathleen Betsko and Rachel Koenig, Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights (New York,. afternoon tea and candle- light dinners in hostess gowns, while the students take an altogether Wendy Wasserstein  4 Wendy Wasserstein, Uncommon Women