Womens History on Stage: Wendy Wasserstein

Kathy Coudle-King
5 days ago
6 min read

It's March which means we just had another snow storm here in North Dakota.

It also means it's Womens History Month. You know, the month when we cram in as much as we can about the roles women have played throughout history and that we STILL are not taught in school?

For awhile, Susan B. Anthony was in circulation (1979--1981) and perhaps prompted discussion of her work. In 1990, Sakakawea was minted on a dollar coin. I heard someone say there was a rule: "Only one woman on U.S. currency at a time".

If you asked the average citizen to make a list of 10 notable women in U.S. history, excluding athletes, First Ladies, and entertainers, they'd be hard pressed to come up with a genuine list. Ask them to make a list of 10 notable men, same requirements, and I'd bet you a Susan B. Anthony dollar they could do it and in a lot less time. When it comes to women playwrights, well, first you might have to explain what a playwright does. (I have had to do this!)

So, for the rest of the month, I am challenging myself to write a short blog each Saturday about a woman who contributed to the theatre. I will let you know when I have to succumb to Googling, but my first profile of a woman in theatre just requires some fact checking of dates:

Wendy Wasserstein - a role model

Reading Wendy Wasserstein's play Uncommon Women and Others at the age of 16 inspired me to become a playwright. I had written one ten-minute play as a class assignment (at South Miami Senior High under the direction of Billie Bernstein). The prompt was "two people are sitting on a bench. What happens next?" Whatever it was I wrote never made it to Broadway, but I loved the process of making characters talk. When I read Uncommon Women and Others I thought: I can write about my friendships with other girls? And it could be a play?! I wasn't the only reader/audience member who felt like that. Take a look at this interview with theatre critic Linda Winer interviewing Wendy Wasserstein. (For a trip down the rabbit hole, check out all the women in theatre Winer interviewed: https://tv.cuny.edu/bio/linda_winer)

Enter Stage Right

A door was held open. I walked through, and I've never regretted it. One of the first one-acts I wrote was "The Last Slumber Party" about a trio of girlfriends the eve before one moves out of New York City. The humor was strongly inspired by Wasserstein's play. For those unfamiliar with Uncommon Women and Others, there is a scene in the play when one woman asks another if she's ever tasted her own menstrual blood. Wendy's characters were saying stuff nobody else's characters on stage were saying. Her play was liberating.

A Woman Sits at a Desk in a Room Full of Men - What happens next?

While looking up Wendy's dates, I came across this article in The Paris Review . It relays that when Wendy was the only woman in a playwriting class at Yale one of the male students said, in response to her work, "I just can't get into this."

Can I get a "poor baby?" Imagine his frustration if the majority of plays he read his entire life were from a woman's perspective? Why, he might never have been in that classroom at Yale, never dreamed of writing for the theatre. But Wendy was in that class and she did dream. Actors, directors, and audiences are glad she did.

Not all the guys in her glass were oafs. Christopher Durang was at Yale at the same time and they became good friends, supporting each other's careers. Durang leads me to a teeny-tiny precious connection I have to Wendy.

The Protagonist Speaks Up

When I was an undergrad in NYU's Dramatic Writing Program, it was announced that Wendy would be teaching a Master Class in Playwriting the next semester. You need to know that I was working full-time for NYU at the Law Library to pay my tuition. I squeezed in a class a day for four years, and while I learned so much about dramatic lit in that program, I often felt like I was auditing classes. Not really a part of the program: popped into class, gobbled up all I could, popped back to work. However, when I heard Wendy was going to teach a class, I immediately tried to enroll but was told I would need to get permission from the chair, Janet Neipris.

I knew who the chair was, but I had never taken a class with her, and she certainly did not know me or my work. I was a pretty shy student, unable to speak in class without blushing. But I worked up my courage and made an appointment. I recall sitting on the edge of the seat in her office; she was behind her desk. I gushed about Wendy's work, what Uncommon Women and Others meant to me, and it all came out in a single breath. My face was burning, my throat was tight, but apparently I made my case and Janet Neipris smiled and signed the registration form! I was in!

Wendy: (laughs)

I don't remember learning anything specific in the class. Wendy's style of teaching was to encourage us. One of the first things we had to do was write and share a monologue in class. At the time, the headlines were filled with Imelda Marcos, and her outrageous spending habits -- she had 3,000 pairs of shoes. I wrote a monologue for the Marcos's housekeeper getting locked inside Imelda's shoe closet. I don't remember what happened, but I will never forget making Wendy laugh. She had a big laugh. It filled the room and invited others to laugh. Maybe it was a mercy laugh. Maybe it was a "this is so bad" laugh, but I made Wendy Wasserstein expel her famous guffaw, and I will take that.

This was either winter of 1986 or fall semester of the same year. Wendy was working on The Heidi Chronicles with Seattle Rep. She was flying back and forth from NYC to Seattle, and occasionally had to miss class, but when she did she'd ask her friends to sub for her -- one time it was Christopher Durang.

And the Tony goes to . . .

In 1983, Wendy won a Guggenheim. They give those to encourage brilliant people to go do more brilliant things. And in 1989, Wasserstein did. She won both the Tony -- first solo woman writer to do so -- and the Pulitzer for The Heidi Chronicles. The play opened off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in 1988 and transferred to Broadway in March of '89, directed by Daniel Sullivan. The cast starred Joan Allen, Boyd Gaines, Peter Friedman, and Cynthia Nixon (@cynthiaenixon) on Broadway. Sarah Jessica Parker (@sarahjessicaparker) was in the off Broadway production.

Maybe you'd heard of Wendy Wasserstein? Maybe you hadn't. But now you know, and I encourage you to check out her work. She's a woman in theatre who opened doors for other women, and she was definitely not common.

And happy Womens History Month! -- no apostrophe "s" because when men realize its their history too, we won't have to cram everything into a month.

Uncommon Women and Others (1977), The Heidi Chronicles (1988), The Sisters Rosensweig (1992), An American Daughter (1997), among others.

About her memorial in Playbill.

92 Street Y - with Peter Parnell, Wendy Wasserstein, and Paul Rudnick (1988)

P.S. When I began studying at NYU I was in the acting program at Circle in the Square. After a year, I switched to the Playwrights Horizons' studio where I took a playwriting class from Peter Parnell. Peter and Wendy were good friends and his style of teaching was much like hers: Encourage the budding writer. I think they both knew that a writer who is encouraged writes more, and the more they write, the better they get. It is an approach I take in the classes I teach today.

P.P.S. I remember Peter Parnell saying that Wendy suggested the title for his play, The Rise and Rise of Daniel Rocket, which premiered at Playwrights Horizons in 1982. You can watch a production of it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0YrDmHiosM