Playwright Wendy Wasserstein dies at 55

Wendy Wasserstein, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who turned the concerns of her generation's women into laughter-laced dramatic art, died of cancer Monday in New York. She was 55 and had been in a long battle with lymphoma, according to her longtime friend, Lincoln Center Theatre artistic director Andre Bishop.

Wasserstein plumbed her own life and those of her bright Mount Holyoke College classmates for her first New York success, Uncommon Women and Others.'' Then, as she and they began to face myriad issues both personal (marriage, career, motherhood, beauty, weight) and societal (feminism, politics, anti-Semitism, the media), Wasserstein's subsequent characters also reflected those choices and struggles in plays likeIsn't It Romantic?'', The Heidi Chronicles,''The Sisters Rosensweig'' and ``An American Daughter.''

Wasserstein was born into a successful, driven Jewish family in Brooklyn in 1950. Her father Morris was in textiles (and, his daughter said, invented velveteen). Her mom Lola was a sometimes dancer and once-and-forever Jewish mother, a woman who sat at the ``Sisters Rosensweig'' opening night celebration and observed, after one of the playwright's pals pronounced the party wonderful, "Yes, but wouldn't it be nicer if this were Wendy's wedding?"

One of four children, Wasserstein got an upper-class Manhattan education after the family moved there when she was 12. All of her siblings were successful. Sisters Sandra Meyer, who headed corporate affairs for Citicorp and died of breast cancer in 1997, and Georgette "Gorgeous" Levis, who runs a Vermont bed-and-breakfast with her psychiatrist husband, were the basis for two of the three sisters in the Chekhov-inspired ``Sisters Rosensweig.'' The other was a version of Wendy herself.

Brother Bruce Wasserstein is an investment banker, corporate takeover specialist and chairman of the company that publishes New York Magazine. Wasserstein was a cousin of Leslie Moonves, head of CBS Television, and Melissa Moonves, head of outreach for the Miami International Film Festival.

Slightly dyslexic, Wasserstein at first struggled as a student. She majored in history at Mount Holyoke and earned a master's degree in creative writing at City College. She considered careers in business, law and medicine before heading off to an extraordinary class at Yale Drama School.

Her fellow students there included playwrights Christopher Durang and Ted Talley, and actors Glenn Close, Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver. Her friendships with them and with an array of Tony Award-winning artists - composer-playwright William Finn, the late director Gerald Gutierrez, costume designer William Ivey Long, director-playwright James Lapine, set designer Heidi Ettinger - gave the post-Yale Wasserstein a prominent, enduring theater "family."

Her 1989 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, ``The Heidi Chronicles,'' reflected Wasserstein's wit, intelligence and emotional insight in exploring the evolution of feminist art historian Heidi Holland, a woman unsure of her life choices. Survivor of a rocky relationship, never quite finding the right mate, Heidi decides to become a single mother. And so, finally, did Wasserstein.

In 1999, a month before she turned 49, the playwright gave birth to Lucy Jane Wasserstein, born at 27 weeks, weighing less than 2 pounds. Her name inspired by the Beatles' ``Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,'' her father's identity kept private, Lucy Jane has survived and thrived.

Wasserstein's career had been born 22 years earlier, when she was championed by one of the many fellow theater artists who would become an enduring friend.

Lincoln Center's Bishop produced the full-length version of the play Wasserstein wrote as her one-act Yale Drama School master of fine arts thesis - Uncommon Women and Others'' - at Off-Broadway's Phoenix Theatre in 1977. He continued giving her a dramatic home at New York's Playwrights Horizons then, after he moved on, at Lincoln Center. Her most recent play,Third,'' ran there for two months at the end of 2005.

Wasserstein the woman and Wasserstein the playwright are both special, he said in 1997 before his friend made an appearance at the Miami Book Fair.

"She's a warm, funny, kind and generous person, and many of those qualities are in her plays, though there's a great undercurrent of sadness that people hook into," Bishop said.

"Her plays speak to a lot of concerns of professional, successful, intelligent women everywhere. Part of that is what she writes about and how she writes. Part is that she's so prominent, and so many women load everything onto the backs of these plays. If this were a more just world, there would be many more women's voices on Broadway."

Wasserstein's best-known role was as the woman playwright of her generation, but she also supported herself, and then Lucy Jane, by writing screenplays (she did 1998's The Object of My Affection,'' which starred Jennifer Aniston), books (her children's book,Pamela's First Musical,'' has been turned into a musical that will premiere in April in California), essays and magazine pieces.

Her first novel, ``Elements of Style,'' is to be published by Knopf in April. She also did a bit of acting, and was a smart, funny speaker.

Private about the illness that claimed her life, Wasserstein grew sicker during rehearsals for ``Third,'' which starred Dianne Wiest as a feminist professor who accuses a student of plagiarizing a paper on King Lear.

In his mixed review of the play, which closed Dec. 18 at Lincoln Center, the New York Times' Ben Brantley wrote: "`Third' exhales a gentle breath of autumn, a rueful awareness of death and of seasons past, that makes it impossible to dismiss it as a quick-sketch comedy of political manners."

Wasserstein characterized her work as "serious plays that happen to be comedic." She wrote her best-known funny, serious play - `The Heidi Chronicles'' - because, she said, "it's a story that hadn't been told. It has to do with the idea ofhaving it all' - but even that in having it all, you can still feel inadequate, guilty, insufficient. ... Friendships, time with friends - those are the precious things that seem to go away."

Now Wasserstein is gone. But as her many friends, her family and the legions of theatergoers she touched with her talent and her heart could attest, she made her choices, and she managed her life with uncommon grace.

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(Christine Dolen is the theater critic of The Miami Herald.)

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(c) 2006, The Miami Herald. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.