Review
A daring new play-beautiful, brilliant, angry and funny. Wendy Wasserstein has not merely returned to the broader political concerns of her cherished Pulitzer Prize-winning The Heidi Chronicles, she has returned with a vengeance-electrifyingly reconnected. . . . Enormously moving. --Newsday
This brave and ambitious play portrays with withering accuracy the damage wrought by the tart-tongued TV culture of Washington.-Walter Shapiro, USA Today --USA Today
This brave and ambitious play portrays with withering accuracy the damage wrought by the tart-tongued TV culture of Washington.-Walter Shapiro, USA Today --USA Today
About the Author
Wendy Wasserstein (October 18, 1950 - January 30, 2006) was an award-winning American playwright and an Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. She was the recipient of the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, to Morris Wasserstein, a wealthy textile executive, and his wife, Lola Schliefer, Wasserstein was one of four children, including brother Bruce Wasserstein. Her maternal grandfather was Simon Schliefer, a prominent Polish Jewish playwright who moved to Paterson, New Jersey and became a Hebrew school principal.
Wasserstein earned a B.A. in history from Mount Holyoke College in 1971, an M.A. in creative writing from City College of New York, and an M.F.A. in 1976 from the Yale School of Drama, where her classmates included the future playwright Christopher Durang. In 2002 Wasserstein received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Bates College.
Wasserstein's first production of note was Uncommon Women and Others (her graduate thesis at Yale), a play which reflected her experiences as a student at, and an alumna of, Mount Holyoke College. A full version of the play was produced in 1977 off-Broadway with Glenn Close, Jill Eikenberry, and Swoosie Kurtz playing the lead roles. The play was subsequently produced for PBS with Meryl Streep joining Eikenberry and Kurtz.
In 1989, she won both the Tony and the Pulitzer Prize for her play, The Heidi Chronicles.
Her wry, smart, and often highly comical plays, which explore topics ranging from feminism to family to ethnicity to pop culture, include The Sisters Rosensweig, Isn’t It Romantic, An American Daughter, Old Money, and her most recent work which opened in Fall 2005, Third, [1]. In addition, she wrote the screenplay for the 1998 film, The Object of My Affection.
