Chronicler Of Frayed Feminism

By WALTER SHAPIRO

The anger came first, but it is not an easy emotion for playwright Wendy Wasserstein. Her natural instinct is to charm, to disarm, to retreat from harm. The nervous giggles, the wispy, high-pitched voice, the ingratiating brown eyes and perhaps even the plump figure all seem protective camouflage. For Wasserstein, self-mocking humor has always been the first line of defense against both the judgment of others and her enveloping Jewish family, which cannot understand why a nice girl like Wendy is not married with children at 38. Even her closest friends sometimes find her hard to take entirely seriously. "With that stupid little voice and ratty fur coat," laughs fellow playwright William Finn, "you initially think this lady's a loon, a modern- day Dorothy Parker."

But such surface judgments mask the intensity within Wasserstein, the vision that spawned her new hit Broadway play, The Heidi Chronicles. "I wrote this play because I had this image of a woman standing up at a women's meeting saying, 'I've never been so unhappy in my life,' " Wasserstein explains. "Talking to friends, I knew there was this feeling around, in me and in others, and I thought it should be expressed theatrically. But it wasn't. The more angry it made me that these feelings weren't being expressed, the more anger I put into that play."

But Wasserstein is far too deft a satirist, and far too gentle a person, to compose a screed. Instead, with subtlety and humor in The Heidi Chronicles, she has written a memorable elegy for her own lost generation. Heidi tells the story of a slightly introverted art historian, a fellow traveler in the women's movement, who clings to her values long after her more committed friends switch allegiance from communes to consuming. At the pivotal moment in the play's second act, Heidi (played by Joan Allen) stands behind a lectern on a bare stage, giving a luncheon speech to the alumnae of the prep school she once attended. Slowly the successful veneer of Heidi's life is stripped away as she tries to ad-lib a free-form answer to the assigned topic, "Women, Where Are We Going?" Heidi's soliloquy ends with these words: "I don't blame any of us. We're all concerned, intelligent, good women." Pause. "It's just that I feel stranded. And I thought that the whole point was that we wouldn't feel stranded. I thought the point was that we were all in this together."

There has always been a feminist subtext to Wasserstein's plays, even in her earlier work when she relied on Jewish-mother jokes and collegiate sexual confusions for laughs. Her first success, Uncommon Women and Others, depicted a reunion of Mount Holyoke College alumnae six years after they have left the campus to make their way in the working world. The 1977 off-Broadway cast included Glenn Close, Jill Eikenberry and Swoosie Kurtz. Her 1983 hit comedy, Isn't It Romantic, which ran for two years off-Broadway, is a thinly veiled tale of Wasserstein's relations with her own larger-than-life mother. But even here, Janie Blumberg, the playwright's alter ego, rejects a suffocating marriage with a very eligible doctor and utters Heidi-esque lines like "I made choices based on an idea that doesn't exist anymore." Still, the spirit of the play is more aptly conveyed by Janie's comically maladroit efforts to cook a roast chicken for her boyfriend.

Only in a written playscript does Wasserstein allow herself to be assertive. In conversation, she flees from all self-important declarations of artistic intention. It takes coaxing for Wasserstein just to admit that Heidi represents her bid "to demand attention and announce, 'I have something to say, and I want you to listen.' " She is much more comfortable recalling Heidi's early off-Broadway previews when she was scared that "all the people from Isn't It Romantic would show up waiting for the chicken jokes." Here her voice breaks into a hypertheatrical tone as she parodies the reaction of this mythical audience: "What happened to her? Where's the chicken?"

Even today, there is something unreal for Wasserstein in seeing her name illuminated on a marquee in the heart of New York City's theater district. "I'm an off-Broadway baby," she explains. "When my friends and I write, we imagine small audiences." In fact, The Heidi Chronicles was originally written to be performed at the tiny, 156-seat Playwrights Horizon, the nurturing off-Broadway base camp for a generation of younger playwrights like Wasserstein. Only after the play opened at Playwrights last December to rave reviews and a sold-out three-month run were arrangements made to transport it to Broadway.

It was not entirely a natural migration. Even Wasserstein wonders if a play that includes a scene built around a 1970 feminist consciousness-rais ing group ("Either you shave your legs or you don't" is the refrain) and is filled with arcane political references can ever be commercially successful. "I'm not stupid," Wasserstein laughs. "I don't know if theater parties will say, 'Let's go to this. It's got a great Herbert Marcuse joke.' "

Initially, at least, Marcuse has found a niche on Broadway, with Heidi playing to houses roughly 90% full. Many of the reviews have been a press agent's dream. The New York Daily News's critic hailed Heidi's recent arrival on Broadway with this pronouncement: "I doubt we'll see a better play this season." The other New York papers, as is the custom, chose to let their off- Broadway reviews stand. An "enlightening portrait of her generation," declared the Times, while Newsday poured on the laudatory adjectives: "smart, compassionate, witty, courageous." There were some sharp dissents. TIME's theater critic, William A. Henry III, complained that "Wasserstein has written mostly whiny and self-congratulatory cliches."

The playwright does not deny that bad reviews wound. But these days, there is also a keen pride as Wasserstein views her handiwork on Broadway. "I'm normally a self-deprecating person," she says, putting it mildly. "But when I saw those women on stage in the feminist rap group, I said, 'Good for them, and good for us.' This is a play of ideas. Whether you agree or not doesn't matter."

Wasserstein compares the gathering momentum of her theatrical career to the children's story The Little Engine That Could. Heidi was written in 1987 after a frustrating period that included a musical that never made it out of workshop readings and a filmscript for Steven Spielberg that was shelved. Then, as now, she was living in a Greenwich Village apartment, with no formal attachments aside from a cat named Ginger. Relentlessly social, Wasserstein has built a life revolving around an intricate network of friendships, many with other playwrights. But writing Heidi represented, in part, an acknowledgment that Wasserstein, like her heroine, is a woman alone. As Andre Bishop, the artistic director of Playwrights Horizon, puts it, "Wendy is now coming into her own as a writer and a person, and those two are very much linked."

Even so, Wasserstein's natural medium remains humor. As she explained in a painfully honest essay called "Funny Girl" in New York Woman magazine, "I don't think about being funny very much because it's how I get by. For me it's always been a way to be likable but removed." The result is that outsiders can misinterpret her manner and mistakenly belittle her talent. Playwright Terrence McNally complains that "what people often miss about Wendy is the thoughtful, passionate, mature womanly side of her. She is far more interesting as a mature artist than as this giggling, girlish, daughter-person that people want to take care of."

A few days after Heidi opened on Broadway, Wendy's parents Lola and Morris Wasserstein were asked about their youngest daughter, the successful playwright. Much of the conversation sounded like a leftover scene from Isn't It Romantic. "We're very proud," said Lola, who even in her 70s takes four dance classes a day. "But there's a vacuum," added Morris, a prosperous Manhattan businessman. "Where's the children? Where's the husband?" Here Lola broke in, "Normally, I'm the one to say that. But today I'm on good behavior." A few moments later, the Wassersteins were asked how many grandchildren they have. "Nine," said Lola, "and we're waiting for the tenth." To underline the point, Morris chimed in, "We're waiting for Wendy. Patiently."

Both of these doting parents are Jewish emigres from central Europe who came to New York City as children in the late 1920s. For years, Lola has been the richest source of her daughter's comic material. "Do you know what my mother said to me on the opening night of Uncommon Women?" Wasserstein asks rhetorically. " 'Wendy, where did you get those shoes?' " When Isn't It Romantic was playing off-Broadway, Wasserstein's parents would stroll over to the theater and canvass the crowd. "My mother would call and say, 'Oh, what well-dressed people,' " Wasserstein recalls. "She was proud of me because someone with a long skirt went to see my play."

The three other Wasserstein children are such paragons of conventional success they could almost be lifted out of a Judith Krantz novel. The eldest sister, Sandra Meyer, one of the first generation of pioneering executive women, is a senior corporate officer for Citicorp. The other sister, Georgette Levis, married a psychiatrist and lives in Vermont, where she owns a country inn. Growing up in affluent surroundings on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Wendy was closest to her brother Bruce, three years her senior. A path-forging mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer, he is a co-founder of the investment-banking house Wasserstein Perella & Co., which the Wall Street Journal dubbed "the world's hottest dealmakers."*

From Wendy's perspective, Bruce and her sisters give a new meaning to the concept of sibling rivalry. "On a certain level," she says, "I'm not a very competitive person, so I find my own way." Laughing merrily, she adds, "Would you like to throw your hat in the ring with Bruce and Sandy? Wouldn't you go to drama school too?"

In fact, the decision to enroll in the Yale University School of Drama in 1973 was a turning point in her life. After graduating from Mount Holyoke, Wendy was somewhat at loose ends and living at home in New York. She narrowed her career options to this odd academic choice: business school at Columbia University or drama school. Needless to say, her parents were vocal proponents of business school. "But finally," she recounts, "I decided to take a chance and go to drama school, since you should do what you want to do in life."

Even now Wendy remains fascinated by the way she and her brother have come to represent almost twin poles of the age-old dialectic between art and money. Wendy delights in telling the story of how during the off-Broadway previews of Heidi, she was locked in an intense artistic discussion with Joan Allen when she was handed a message: "Your brother Bruce called. Can't come to the play tonight. Is buying Nabisco." In an essay for New York Woman titled "Big Brother at Forty," Wendy writes wistfully, "We travel in very different worlds, and in some ways we've become enigmas to each other." For his part, Bruce says, "Compared to most sibling relations, we're relatively close." Virtually the only wall decorations in his office are three posters for Isn't It Romantic.

Early in Heidi, the heroine says in exasperation over male self-confidence, "I was wondering what mothers teach their sons that they never bother to tell their daughters." The playwright is inordinately fond of that line, since it springs directly from her own family experience. "God knows," she exclaims, "I'm not going out to merge Nabisco. I stay in my house and write plays." But judging from Wendy Wasserstein's triumph in writing what may be the best play about her generation, there is much to be said for what mothers teach their daughters.

FOOTNOTE: *Wasserstein Perella was one of Time Inc.'s investment bankers for its recently proposed merger with Warner Communications Inc.