Customer Reviews

Uncommon Women and Others.

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Wendy Wasserstein's debut play brings women's liberation to hilarious but sympathetic life in this 1970 drama. Setting the play at Mount Holyoke College, Wasserstein focuses on six young women who are about to graduate and enter a world newly sensitized to feminist goals. Caught between traditional values of home and hearth, and rival goals of sexual liberation and personal liberation, these women are on the cusp of a whole new way of life. The play opens a few years after graduation as the women meet to reminisce about their lives in college, where "milk-and-crackers" teas and "gracious living" have dominated.

The play is both sympathetic and satiric, as an Emily Dickinson-reading "housemother," works to make these students into "ladies" while they explore options never before open to them. Discussions of Women's History courses, references to Father-Daughter Weekend, and interactions among the various women as they explore who they are and who they will become illustrate the changing values of the times. Rita is the dominant figure, a promiscuous and iconoclastic woman who wants to write the great American novel and who refuses to bend to convention.

In contrast to her is Leilah, a shy student who avoids the spotlight and who plans to study anthropology in Iraq after graduation. Other characters include Kate, who plans to attend law school; Samantha, who is in love and believes her primary role is to be wife and mother; Holly Kaplan, who is not sure what she wants her role to be; and Muffet, who becomes "partly liberated" but has yet to define her ultimate goals. Throughout the play, a disembodied male voice narrates a promotional film for the college, illustrating the gap between what is real (as presented onstage) and what is ideal (as the college presents its PR).

Wonderfully poignant pictures of the social, sexual, and personal conflicts faced by these bright students in 1970 evolve as the students fumblingly make the transition between traditional expectations and unlimited possibilities. The humor is broad but to the point, and anyone who attended a similar college in the 1970s will identify with the conflicts experienced by these "uncommon women" on the cusp of true "liberation." Mary Whipple

It was in wonderful condition and was exactly what I was looking for! Thanks for the great price, too!

I narrowly missed attending a Seven Sisters College, but this play shows me everything I might have missed--for good or ill.

It's a time capsule, most forcefully, of the 1970s Women's Movement Early Days--thoughtfully and comically presenting relationships between women, personalities and choices, while probing the question, "What does success really mean? When is enough really enough?"

--Janet Grace Riehl, author Sightlines: A Poet's Diary

This is probably the funniest play I've read in years. Quick-witted characters, hilarious situtations - two thumbs way up for Ms. Wasserstein!