"Wendy and the Lost Boys": Wasserstein's stranger-than-fiction life

If you're an American female playwright, particularly one who went to a Seven Sisters college, you're going to have to grapple with the legacy of Wendy Wasserstein. We all have our literary forebears that we do battle with in that "Anxiety of Influence" kind of way, and Wasserstein is one of mine. Not the only one, certainly. But Uncommon Women and Others was a big, big influence on me when I was writing Pleiades, and I wrote a college term paper on The Heidi Chronicles. And Wasserstein is the archetypal Baby Boomer female playwright, and I am a daughter of Boomers, so in some sense, it's like she is my mother...

As such, I had wanted to read Julie Salamon's biography of Wasserstein, Wendy and the Lost Boys, ever since it came out two years ago. But I was also hesitant: I read reviews stating that the biography made Wasserstein out to be a sadder and more complicated woman than she ever let on. Is this what it meant to be a female artist? (Must a female artist suffer?) Would reading the book just depress me? I knew that Wasserstein never found romantic love, and I too was suffering bad luck in my love life, and in my more cynical moments I'd repeat to myself, "Arthur Miller married Marilyn Monroe, and Wendy Wasserstein died alone."

Maybe I finally allowed myself to read Wendy and the Lost Boys this month because I am secure and happy in a relationship, so the story of a romantically-frustrated female playwright now has less power to trigger my neuroses. Anyway, here's my Goodreads review of the biography.

  Wendy and the Lost Boys: The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein by Julie Salamon

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


"Wendy and the Lost Boys" is a fascinating biography that ferrets out some of the secrets and sorrows that Wendy Wasserstein hid beneath her giggly, lovably self-deprecating public persona. In some respects, Wasserstein was a typical Baby Boomer woman, breaking the glass ceiling in the '70s, giving up her bohemian roots and becoming part of the Establishment during the '80s and '90s, etc. In other respects, she was completely atypical. Her parents, siblings, friendships, and romantic relationships were all far more complicated than she ever revealed to the public, either in her plays (which were often semi-autobiographical) or her magazine essays.

Julie Salamon tells this story capably, bringing to life the vivid "cast of characters" that made up Wendy's world. Many of Wasserstein's famous friends, such as Christopher Durang and André Bishop, spoke to Salamon and provided valuable insights. (Dishiest piece of gossip: around the time "The Heidi Chronicles" was on Broadway, Wendy had a lengthy affair with Terrence McNally -- though McNally was gay, and had formerly been Edward Albee's boyfriend!)

Salamon's writing shows some signs of fatigue in the later chapters of the book -- lots of one-sentence paragraphs, things like that. Nevertheless, the final chapters are surprisingly suspenseful, as Wendy has a "mystery" baby and then a "mystery" illness, all within the last six years of her too-short life. Her secretiveness about the pregnancy and about her baby's father is mirrored by her secretiveness about the lymphoma that killed her. If this were a play, you might not believe it -- but this is Wendy's uncommon life.

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"Pleiades" Reading, Part 1: "The Virgin Suicides," "The Big House," and Wendy Wasserstein

As I work on Pleiades, my latest full-length play, here are some brief thoughts about the books I've been reading as informal research, to educate me about the world of the play or just to get me in the mood to write it.

First up, Jeffrey Eugenides' acclaimed debut novel, The Virgin Suicides. (I also re-watched the film version, which I had last seen when I was in high school.) Reason: The Virgin Suicides is a novel about five beautiful sisters in a wealthy community in the 1970s, and Pleiades is a play about seven beautiful sisters in a wealthy community in the 1970s.

I admired the novel, but I don't think that it will have much influence on the play that I'm writing. The Virgin Suicides is noted for its first-person-plural narration -- it's told from the perspective of the men who were once the Lisbon sisters' neighbors and schoolmates, and still mourn their deaths twenty years later. As such, one of the novel's main themes is how men romanticize beautiful women and see them as unfathomable mysteries. Because of the unusual narration, the novel cannot present the Lisbon sisters' actual thoughts; everything is filtered through the narrators' haze of memory and longing and conjecture and tragedy. Again, this is very effective. But it's the opposite of what I want to do with Pleiades -- I want my female characters to have subjectivity, to speak for themselves.

The film version is remarkably faithful to the novel -- it has a male narrator who speaks in the first-person-plural and everything -- and yet the tone is somehow different. It captures the girls more intimately, sometimes showing their perspective in close-up, while the novel presents the girls as shadowy and elusive. Maybe that's just because the teen boys' voyeuristic fascination with the Lisbon sisters can't be effectively reproduced on film. Or maybe it's because Sofia Coppola brought a young woman's perspective to the material. The book is about what it's like to observe adolescent girls and wonder at their mystery; the film is more about what it's like to be an adolescent girl. As such, the movie has become a touchstone for a generation of romantic, dreamy girls who admire its aesthetics -- which is maybe the most disturbing thing about this disturbing story, when you think about it.

I read about The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home on some blog a couple of months ago, and immediately added it to my reading list. I had decided to set Pleiades at a summer home in the Hamptons, only to realize that I didn't actually know much about summer houses, the Hamptons, WASP culture, etc. So it was quite serendipitous that I stumbled across The Big House, a National Book Award finalist in 2003. The author is George Howe Colt, a poet, journalist, and descendant of Boston Brahmins. Colt, like the girls in Pleiades, is also a Baby Boomer; I think that a minor theme of Pleiades will be the decline of WASP culture in the '60s-'70s, and that's also a theme of The Big House.

The Big House is a combination of memoir, family history, and investigation of/paean to Boston Brahmin summer rituals. Colt's great-grandfather Ned Atkinson built a shingled summer mansion at Buzzards Bay, Cape Cod in 1902, and through the entire 20th century, it served as the heart of the family. The last chapters of the book deal with the need to sell the house as it became a "white elephant" burden to them in the 1990s, but I found these narrative sections less compelling than the earlier parts of the book, where Colt merely attempts to create a sense of place. He has a marvelous eye for detail, and lovingly describes both the objects and the people that filled the Big House.

Colt is nostalgic and proud of his heritage, but realizes that not everything about his house or his family were perfect. His tales of hidden WASP dysfunction almost make me want to write a whole series of plays about the Greek gods as upper-class Americans in the Gilded Age and beyond. (This is kind of similar to Francesca Zambello's production of the Ring cycle, currently at the San Francisco Opera. It is called the "American Ring" and portrays the Norse gods as a dysfunctional, wealthy family in Great Gatsby-style costumes. I haven't seen it, but a friend of mine is really enjoying it.) Reading The Big House also taught me that the American old-money upper class isn't as monolithic as it first appears. Colt's family were frugal, practical Boston Brahmins who summered on rugged Cape Cod, but I want my Pleiades to be a little more relaxed and pleasure-seeking. Their family is based in the New York area, rather than Boston. They live in Connecticut and summer in the Hamptons.

I was obsessed with Wendy Wasserstein's Uncommon Women and Others my senior year of high school -- and if you love a play as a teenager, chances are that it will stick with you for the rest of your life. So when I realized that I would be writing a play about a group of young women in the early 1970s, I started referring to it as "my Uncommon Women and Others play" and decided that I needed to reread some Wasserstein. After all, what other playwright did as much as her to chronicle the second-wave feminist movement? I'm even including a "consciousness-raising party" scene in Pleiades as a tribute to the consciousness-raising scene in The Heidi Chronicles.

Uncommon Women serves as a fascinating time capsule of the social and sexual mores of its era. For instance, in 1971: being a female college student who masturbates = weird. Being a female college student who hangs out on the quads of men's colleges with the explicit goal of picking up guys and sleeping with them = normal. In 2011, it's the other way around. (Progress!)

But rereading these plays, I am also struck by how sad they are, how their humor masks anger, confusion, and unfulfilled longings. In high school, I think I loved Uncommon Women for its portrayal of funny, gutsy young women with strong friendships. But now, the final line of the play, Rita's "When we're... forty-five, we can be really fucking amazing" just breaks my heart.

Or, take the ending of The Heidi Chronicles, where Heidi proclaims that her newly adopted baby, Judy, will be "a heroine for the twenty-first!" I'm sure that when the play premiered in 1989, Baby Boomer women found this sentiment inspirational: "maybe life has been difficult for us, but it will be so much better for our daughters!" But I am basically the same age as Judy, and it is the twenty-first century, and I don't feel much like a heroine, and life still feels difficult and full of glass ceilings and boys' clubs and politicians who want to set back women's rights. Did you see the survey yesterday showing that young American men overwhelmingly would prefer a son to a daughter -- and even worse, a women in the comments section saying "I am a woman in my twenties, and I would much prefer to have a male child rather than a female child. ... It continues to be (and may always be) easier for a man to succeed along many of the metrics by which society defines success: income, title, athletic prowess, sexual satisfaction. It's not that I don't want women to fight the good fight to equalize opportunities for both genders. I do, and I think of myself as fighting this fight. At the same time, I want to afford my children every advantage possible, and one major advantage is being male." God, that pisses me off. To live in a world where a woman can argue that internalized self-loathing is a rational reaction.

Here's a link to a blog post I wrote about Wendy Wasserstein three years ago. Because I identify as a feminist and a playwright (and am very aware that playwriting is still a male-dominated profession) I think that I will be wrestling with Wasserstein's legacy, and the work that she left behind, for a long time to come...

I'm not yet done with my Pleiades script or with reading books that I hope will inspire me. Next up: Cheerful Money by Tad Friend (another WASP memoir) and The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (early '70s feminist classic, which I first learned about via a mention in Uncommon Women and Others)!

Remembering Wendy Wasserstein

If you had told me in, say, 2004, that Arthur Miller, August Wilson, and Wendy Wasserstein would all die within a twelve-month period, I would have said you were crazy. Sure, Miller was almost 90 years old, but Wilson was in his late 50s and Wasserstein was five years younger than that. However, that sad prediction turned out to be the truth. Wilson never got the chance to show us what he would do after he completed his impressive Century Cycle. Wasserstein's death deprived baby-boomer women of the playwright most devoted to chronicling their stories.

Wasserstein belongs to my mother's generation, but because there still aren't a lot of successful American female playwrights, I looked up to her too. It seems that no one ever had a bad thing to say about her, and I imagined that if I became a playwright, I might get to meet her, thank her, chat with her... So her death really saddened me. I wrote a paper that spring on The Heidi Chronicles, as a homage.

I meant to post this entry on January 30, the second anniversary of Wasserstein's death, but was too busy polishing up a play of my own. Though that's appropriate, too. It's even an instance of my life coming full circle. I just discovered an e-mail I wrote to my adviser two years ago, expressing my sadness about Wasserstein and my excitement to start researching a new play. My adviser wrote back:

I was also shocked to learn of Wendy Wasserstein's death, although I did know that she was seriously ill. Wendy delivered an address in the chapel at Vassar at one point, and it was a huge success. She was very honest and very funny. Sometimes I think the two things go together. And she was also, I think, a significant playwright. She knew what life is about and how to dramatize it. You should write your paper on The Heidi Chronicles. More importantly, however, you should keep writing plays yourself. Show Wendy's spirit the stuff Marissa is made of. Get inside Hallie Flanagan. She will bounce you around a bit, both intellectually and emotionally.

Of course, this "new play" turned into my senior thesis play--the one about Hallie Flanagan and the 1930s. But I doubt any of us knew that it would take me exactly two years to find the structure for this play--two years since I started researching it, two years since Wendy's death.

I'll admit sometimes I'm a little annoyed at Wasserstein's plays for their lack of "theatricality"--they do not use the stage in innovative ways, and her most famous play, The Heidi Chronicles, is episodic. I wouldn't really call the events of her plays "gripping," and even her celebrated wit makes you chuckle, not guffaw; nor does she pierce you with black humor. There's a very interesting article in The Boston Globe that relates to this--whether it's OK to criticize Wasserstein's work for its style and narrowness of scope, in light of all the good she did for female playwrights. I agree with a lot of what this article says.

Despite the baby-boomer focus of her plays, I do relate to Wasserstein's characters. This year, I've thought a lot about Uncommon Women and Others, because it concerns a group of girls in their senior year of college. One of my housemates is a driven pre-law student, just like the character of Kate; another is a funny, self-deprecating Jewish girl, like Holly.

My high school almost produced Uncommon Women my senior year, at my suggestion. Originally, our theater teacher planned to produce the all-female play Vital Signs, which is a collection of about 30 short monologues. I read it and found it boring, so my teacher challenged me to come up with something better. The next morning, I invaded his homeroom and thrust Uncommon Women under his nose. He agreed to produce it, and for the next few weeks we thought about the play, watched the TV version repeatedly, discussed the pop-culture references, etc.

At the time, I wanted to play Kate, Rita, or Leilah--and I can still see aspects of those three characters within me. Kate is my driven, determined side--the part of me that knows I am going to be a playwright and will let nothing stand in my way. Rita is the part of me that likes to make people laugh--the part of me that enjoys crazy costume parties and oddball theories and acting like a loopy drama major. And Leilah is my insecurities and neurosis and feeling like an eternal runner-up.

We ended up not producing Uncommon Women, because most of the females who auditioned were high-school freshmen, and it wouldn't be right to see them discuss sex and orgasms and menstruation. It still remains one of my favorite Wasserstein plays, perhaps because her characters are youngest and I can relate to them best, perhaps because it's less tied to seminal baby-boomer events than The Heidi Chronicles is, perhaps because it's one of the few plays I know that celebrates female friendship above all other relationships.

Indeed, Wasserstein said, she wrote Uncommon Women because she wanted to see an all-female curtain call on the stage of the stodgy old Yale School of Drama. That's what I love about her. That's what still inspires me.

A Living Cliché

I resemble this more than I would like to admit: John Turturro as Barton Fink

I feel like a bit of a cliché right about now: the struggling writer. The new draft of my play stares me in the face whenever I open up my computer, I'm reading Anna Deavere Smith's Letters to a Young Artist in the hopes it will provide some wise advice, and a few days ago I watched Barton Fink, one of the canonical movies about writer's block.

I liked the movie, but it didn't exactly reassure me. It insists that some people, like Barton, are just destined to be one-hit wonders. Not what I need to hear right now! Not on the day when some people I trust finally responded to me after reading the first draft of my new play--and we all agree it needs a lot of work.

I didn't intend for Barton Fink to parallel my situation like this--I first watched it because I am curious about Clifford Odets and knew the character of Barton was loosely based on him. Also, I'm a Coen Brothers fan--loved their dialogue here, especially the dead-on parody of Awake and Sing! But why the constant need to denigrate Barton? Joel and Ethan, you're writers too--can't you have some sympathy for the guy?

Another maybe-inspirational thing I just read was Wendy Wasserstein's Shiksa Goddess essay collection. Many of the pieces are short, satirical, and past their sell-by date; but others are more serious and valuable, dealing with feminism or playwriting or the arts... The last and longest essay is about the birth of Wasserstein's daughter Lucy Jane, who was born premature and required several weeks in an incubator. Because of this--because Wasserstein is a female playwright--my subconscious mind associated the difficult birth of a baby with the difficult birth of a play. The night after I finished Shiksa Goddess and watched Barton Fink and started really obsessing about my play, I dreamed that I had given birth to a premature baby and was nursing it back to health. I don't doubt that it's a metaphor for my feelings toward revising and nurturing this play.

I'm actually pretty impressed with my subconscious mind for devising this metaphor--it's more truthful than anything my conscious mind has devised lately. I wonder what male writers dream about as they struggle with their work--since they obviously can't dream about pregnancy and birth!

Two Ways of Classifying Playwrights

I've just started digging into this week's New York Times Magazine-- the annual "The Lives They Lived" issue, highlighting interesting people who died in 2007. In past years, my favorite articles in this section have been Tony Kushner's short plays (check out his works on Nixon's shrink and on two unusual women) but he didn't contribute one this year.

Meanwhile, I'm also reading Wendy Wasserstein's compilation of essays Shiksa Goddess, and it includes a "The Lives They Lived" article from 1996, about Martha Entenmann, founder of the baked-goods empire and inventor of the see-through cake box. That got me thinking about something I heard once and remember often, about writers and food:

It's summer 2006, about ten o'clock at night, and I and seven other winners of the Young Playwrights' Contest are sitting in the Morning Star Diner devouring big slices of pie with Lucas and Sheri, who work at Young Playwrights. We thank them for the food and the invaluable experience of feeling like a successful New York writer.

Sheri says, "There's two kinds of playwrights in this world: those who lose weight when they're writing a play, and those who gain weight." She explains that the people who lose weight stay up all night and subsist on cigarettes and coffee and alcohol when they have to finish a play. Meanwhile, the gainers write in cafes or restaurants, or they need to feel cozy and comforted while writing, and so they snack a lot.

Some of my fellow winners, mostly the guys, are attracted by the macho romance of being one of the weight-losing playwrights: drinking and smoking and sweating out a Hemingwayesque masterpiece. (Some of them even use typewriters.) But I sheepishly admit, "I'm probably a gainer."

Sheri and Lucas assure me that I'm in good company: Tony Kushner and Wendy Wasserstein are also gainers. "You can always tell when Tony's working on a new play!" laughs Sheri.

I still think about this way of classifying writers. And Lucas and Sheri's assessments seem to be spot-on. Wasserstein writes about food in several of the Shiksa Goddess essays, and I just watched a documentary about Kushner called Wrestling with Angels, where he talks about becoming 100 pounds overweight because he always wrote with a box of Entenmann's chocolate chip cookies by his side.

So what is it about playwrights and Entenmann's? Have I just been eating the wrong cookies all these years? If I switch to Entenmann's, will I suddenly acquire the eloquence of Kushner and Wasserstein?

It's worth a shot. Except, of course, for the "gaining weight" aspect.