Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Wasserstein, Wendy (Vol. 183) - Jan Balakian (essay date 1999)

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Jan Balakian (essay date 1999)

SOURCE: Balakian, Jan. “Wendy Wasserstein: A Feminist Voice from the Seventies to the Present.” In The Cambridge Companion to American Women Playwrights, edited by Brenda Murphy, pp. 213-31. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

[In the following essay, Balakian traces the evolution of Wasserstein's feminist dramaturgy from Uncommon Women and Others through An American Daughter, highlighting the cultural confusion regarding contemporary women's roles that informs the characterizations of each play's respective protagonists.]

As a young girl growing up in Brooklyn, and later in New York, Wendy Wasserstein experienced the conspicuous double standards between boys and girls that ignited her feminist instincts. While her brother received Richard Halliburton's Complete Book of Marvels—a travel guide to spectacular places around the world—for his Bar Mitzvah, she was reading...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Wendy Wasserstein and Esther Cohen (interview date August 1987)
   2. Gerald Weales (review date 5 May 1989)
   3. Joanne Kirschner (review date 1990)
   4. Kate Davy (review date March 1990)
   5. Helene Keyssar (essay date March 1991)
   6. Wendy Wasserstein and The Playwright's Art (interview date 9 October 1991)
   7. Alex Raksin (review date 30 May 1993)
   8. Sheridan Morley (review date 20 August 1994)
   9. Stefan Kanfer (review date 7 November 1994)
   10. Richard Donahue (essay date 22 April 1996)
   11. Ilene Cooper (review date 1 June 1996)
   12. Stefan Kanfer (review date 7 April 1997)
   13. Claudia Barnett (review date December 1997)
   14. Stephen J. Whitfield (essay date 1997)
   15. Jan Balakian (essay date 1999)
   16. David Shengold (review date March 2000)
   17. Publishers Weekly (review date 23 April 2001)
   18. Miriam M. Chirico (essay date 2001)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright