“Did you ever think you could be great if only. I live in the fantasy where that if onlydoesn’t exist. In reality it looks larger every day” (98).
– Wendy Wasserstein in a letter to her friend, Ruth
“…that famous high-pitched giggle…as she spun the facts into another bittersweet, funny-serious story of a modern woman’s search for her place in the world.”
– Julie Salamon’s, Wendy and The Lost Boys, p. 40
Wendy Wasserstein was born on October 18, 1950. She was born to Jewish-immigrant parents, Lola and Morris Wasserstein. Wendy was the youngest of five siblings – Sandra, Abner, Georgette (nicknamed “Gorgeous”), and Bruce (3). Sandra, who was thirteen at the time, decided to name her Wendy after Wendy Darling from J.M. Barrie’s, Peter Pan (28).
Due to the success of her family’s ribbon business, Wendy was born into a prosperous family (27). They lived in a three-story, eighteen room house in Brooklyn, and Wendy and her siblings attended private schools (28).
However, like any family, the Wasserstein family was filled with secrets. The mother, Lola, was not a very sensitive woman and she believed that survival lay in hiding the truth (38). It was many years until Wendy and Bruce learned that Sandra and Abner were their half-siblings, as Lola was first married to George, Morris’ older brother (15). Morris and Lola married two years after George’s death (20). Lola and George’s son, Abner, began having seizures at age five and his speech stopped developing normally (23). He was later sent to the Devereux School, a progressive institution for mentally disabled children. Though Lola and Morris would continue visiting Abner, by the time Wendy was born, any mention of Abner had been erased (24).
Lola was a difficult woman to live with and was not a particularly affectionate mother. To give one an idea of Lola is best summarized by what she said to a young Wendy. One day, when the two of them were walking down the street, Lola said that people were looking at Wendy and thinking: “Look at that fat girl” (61). Wendy would grow up with body issues, struggling with her weight and appearance.
In Salamon’s biography on Wendy, Salamon suggests that Lola’s “lack of sensitivity” resulted in Wendy becoming “…hyperempathetic, even to inanimate objects.” Salamon learned from Georgette, the middle daughter, that every night before Wendy went to sleep, she would say good night to each of her dolls and stuffed animals, even rotating their positions on her bed so they would not feel excluded. Lola described Wendy as the shy child (34).
Wendy was close with her siblings, depending on her sisters throughout her college years (72). She adored Bruce but also found him annoying (37). Bruce was also considered to be the most brilliant by his parents and the most obnoxious by his siblings (32). Sandra became like a mother to Wendy, as their thirteen-year age difference allowed for a more mother-daughter relationship. Bruce and Wendy worshipped Sandy, and they associated Sandy “…with a feeling of being protected from Lola’s erratic behavior and with tenderness that wasn’t Lola’s to give” (29). Sandra sang Broadway songs to Bruce and Wendy and was the one to read them bedtime stories (29). Sandra left for the University of Michigan before her sixteenth birthday (30).
Wendy attended the Calhoun School where she struggled at times with her grades. She was sent to specialists, where she learned she had dyslexia (37). A teacher of Wendy’s at Calhoun said: “Wendy had the most interesting mind of any student I ever had. There’s smart, which is what comes up on the IQ test. And then there’s intelligence that has the element of imagination in it. Wendy had real intelligence, imagination, the ability to see beyond what was in front of her” (56-57).
During her senior year of high school, Wendy applied to Mount Holyoke College, her top school. She was waitlisted at first (60) until she was then later accepted. She studied history at Mount Holyoke from 1967 to 1971. However, her experience at Mount Holyoke was not what she or a close friend of hers had expected. They found the school to be stuck in the 1950s, with women wanting to find husbands (67). Despite this, a few years after graduation, Wendy would write: “Although I hated the reality of Mount Holyoke, recently I’ve become much more attached to the idea of it; the warmth, intelligence, and I guess (ha-ha) sincerity” (74).
In order to cope at Mount Holyoke, Wendy would entertain the other “misfits” in her room, as they would eat, talk, and listen to her large collection of Broadway records. Wendy tended to “couch her…unhappiness, in stories and jokes” (74). She therefore turned her life into a funny story, even joking about her grades, which had turned into “…C’s and D’s, even in the subjects she liked,” which included English and History (70).
Wendy was encouraged by one of her friends to take a drama course with her, where they then took a playwriting class together. Wendy’s playwriting teacher did not predict her future stardom, but said that during his class, Wendy “…found what she had to say could be said” (86). Wendy also choreographed Peter Pan her senior year of college, having had strong dance training when she was younger (95).
As graduation came around, Wendy began to feel nervous about her future. Her mother had pushed for law school, and unfortunately, Wendy had not been accepted to any (95). By the time she graduated and returned to living with her parents, she felt like she had become the loser of the family, not having any job prospects and no husband (102).
Wendy began taking classes at City College, where she was taught by Israel Horovitz, famous playwright and director, and Joseph Heller, the author of Catch-22 (106). After reading some of her writing, Heller said: “Wendy this is fabulous, you’ve got a real talent here. You should stay with this” (106). Salamon concludes that the classes with Horovitz and Heller “awakened something profound in Wendy” (107).
In 1973, Robert Moss, the founder of Playwrights Horizons, decided to put on Wendy’s one-act play, Any Woman Can’t. The show received the 10 pm slot and ran for five performances (114). At the same time, Wendy was accepted into Yale Drama School and Columbia Business School, where she decided to attend Yale (116). (She attended at the same time as actresses Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver).
After graduating Yale in 1976 (139), Wasserstein’s play, Uncommon Women and Others, which was her master-thesis at Yale, was workshopped at Playwrights Horizons (152). In 1978, the play was produced for television, with Meryl Streep playing the character of Leilah. (Fun fact: the exterior scenes were filmed on the campus of Trinity College).
In 1989, Wendy became the first woman to win the Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize for her play, The Heidi Chronicles. The play, which premiered at Playwrights Horizons, received rave reviews. André Bishop, the Artistic Director at the time, said that the “…audience’s enthusiasm confirmed his belief that Wendy had written something exceptional” (262). Wendy would go on to write more plays, including The Sisters Rosensweig, a play based on Sandra and Georgette. She also wrote books and wrote a couple of films.
At 48 years old, Wendy became pregnant through in-vitro fertilization. She gave birth three months prematurely, to a daughter she named Lucy Jane. The father remains unknown (345).
Wendy sadly passed away from cancer on January 30, 2006 at age 55 (1). In Wendy’s honor, the lights dimmed on Broadway.
Wendy Wasserstein remains a prolific playwright in the world of theater. She was a feminist and her plays clearly demonstrate this, as they emphasize women and the female experience. I have never connected more to a play than I have with The Heidi Chronicles. Wasserstein was an incredibly exceptional woman and I highly recommend her work. Julie Salamon’s biography on her is also very interesting and if you would like to learn more, I suggest reading it (you may just find that you have a lot in common with Wendy).
Additional Family Facts – Sandra became a high-ranking corporate executive; Georgette married young, had children, and then became the successful owner of a large country inn; and Bruce became a billionaire superstar of the investment-banking world (7). Sandra died of cancer in 1997 and Georgette passed away from cancer as well in 2014. Bruce died in 2009. Lola passed away in 2007.
October 24, 2018
Works Cited
Salamon, Julie. Wendy and The Lost Boys. New York, Penguin Group, 2011.
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