The anger came first, but it is not an easy emotion for playwright Wendy Wasserstein. Her natural instinct is to charm, to disarm, to retreat from harm. The nervous giggles, the wispy, high-pitched voice, the ingratiating brown eyes and perhaps even the plump figure all seem protective camouflage. For Wasserstein, self-mocking humor has always been the first line of defense against both the judgment of others and her enveloping Jewish family, which cannot understand why a nice girl like Wendy is not married with children at 38. Even her closest friends sometimes find her hard to take entirely seriously. "With that stupid little voice and ratty fur coat," laughs fellow playwright William Finn, "you initially think this lady's a loon, a modern- day Dorothy Parker."
But such surface judgments mask the intensity within Wasserstein, the vision that spawned her new hit Broadway play, The Heidi Chronicles. "I wrote this play because I had this image of a woman standing up at a women's meeting saying, 'I've never been so unhappy in my life,' " Wasserstein explains. "Talking to friends, I knew there was this feeling around, in me and in others, and I thought it should be expressed theatrically. But it wasn't. The more angry it made me that these feelings weren't being expressed, the more anger I put into that play."
But Wasserstein is far too deft a satirist, and far too gentle a person, to compose a screed. Instead, with subtlety and humor in The Heidi Chronicles, she has written a memorable elegy for her own lost generation. Heidi tells the story of a slightly introverted art historian, a fellow traveler in the women's movement, who clings to her values long after her more committed friends switch allegiance from communes to consuming. At the pivotal moment in the play's second act, Heidi (played by Joan Allen) stands behind a lectern on a bare stage, giving a luncheon speech to the alumnae of the prep school she once attended. Slowly the successful veneer of Heidi's life is stripped away as she tries to ad-lib a free-form answer to the assigned topic, "Women, Where Are We Going?" Heidi's soliloquy ends with these words: "I don't blame any of us. We're all concerned, intelligent, good women." Pause. "It's just that I feel stranded. And I thought that the whole point was that we wouldn't feel stranded. I thought the point was that we were all in this together."
There has always been a feminist subtext to Wasserstein's plays, even in her earlier work when she relied on Jewish-mother jokes and collegiate sexual confusions for laughs. Her first success, Uncommon Women and Others, depicted a reunion of Mount Holyoke College alumnae six years after they have left the campus to make their way in the working world. The 1977 off-Broadway cast included Glenn Close, Jill Eikenberry and Swoosie Kurtz. Her 1983 hit comedy, Isn't It Romantic, which ran for two years off-Broadway, is a thinly veiled tale of Wasserstein's relations with her own larger-than-life mother. But even here, Janie Blumberg, the playwright's alter ego, rejects a suffocating marriage with a very eligible doctor and utters Heidi-esque lines like "I made choices based on an idea that doesn't exist anymore." Still, the spirit of the play is more aptly conveyed by Janie's comically maladroit efforts to cook a roast chicken for her boyfriend.