SOURCE: Wasserstein, Wendy, and The Playwright's Art. “Wendy Wasserstein.” In The Playwright's Art: Conversations with Contemporary American Dramatists, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, pp. 257-76. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995.

[In the following interview, originally conducted on October 9, 1991, Wasserstein discusses her early career and the implications of her success, aspects of her writing process, the influence and role of women in contemporary theatre, and the critical and popular reception of her plays, particularly The Heidi Chronicles, both in the United States and abroad.]

Wendy Wasserstein was born in 1950 in Brooklyn, New York. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College and the Yale School of Drama, she is the author of Any Woman Can't (1973), Happy Birthday, Montpelier Pizz-zazz (1974), When Dinah Shore Ruled the Earth (with Christopher Durang; 1975), Uncommon Women and Others (1977), Isn't It Romantic (1981), Tender Offer (1983), The Man in a Case (adapted from a Chekhov story; 1986), Miami (1986), The Heidi Chronicles (1988), and The Sisters Rosensweig (1992). The Heidi Chronicles received the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award, and the New York Drama Critics Award; and The Sisters Rosensweig was awarded the Outer Critics Circle Award. She adapted John Cheever's story “The Sorrows of Gin” for the PBS Great Performances series. Her book of essays, Bachelor Girls, was published in 1990. In 1993 she received the William Inge Award. This interview took place on October 9, 1991.

[Interviewer]: If you think back to your home life and your upbringing, what are the things that sort of pulled you to the theatre?

[Wasserstein]: Gosh, I think a lot of it has to do with my mother, Lola, who's a dancer. I grew up taking dancing classes at the June Taylor School of the Dance. They were the dancers on the old Jackie Gleason Show. I've often said that my two theatrical mentors were June Taylor and Bob Brustein! I grew up with chorus girls, and it was show biz. My parents took me to Broadway matinees. I love theatres; I love being inside theatres. There's a certain calm to me before the storm. I love plays and the immediacy of them. My grandfather wrote Yiddish plays, and my mother sort of has a theatricality to her. People named Lola who dance often do! She's quite a funny woman actually.

It's interesting about people's parents. My dad owned a textile factory; supposedly he invented velveteen. All I remember was was that there was a color called Wendy Blue that was a discontinued line. I remember at Playwrights Horizons people always said that the signature of a Playwrights Horizons play through all those years was sort of bright urban comedies, sometimes Ivy League, and I think actually they're wrong. The signature is, all the flats in those plays are black velveteen from Wasserstein Ribbons! Even Stephen Sondheim or Alfred Uhry, they all had the black velveteen! I remember when I would go down to The Heidi Chronicles to check on the play, it reminded me very much of my father going to his factory. We were both in production, and that interested me. I think it's also interesting thinking in terms of who's creative in the world; it broadens your idea of who's creative. I remember when I was in college I always thought I couldn't grow up to be an artist or in the theatre because women in the theatre wore black and had Pre-Raphaelite hair, the silver earrings, the shawl, the cheekbones, and the Fred Braun sandals, and I was never one of those people. I think knowing that about the velveteen and my father sort of changes that a little bit.

Why do you write comedies? Do you think that's just the way you think? Are they comedies?

I think they are serious plays that are funny. I'm a very unpretentious person, and I can't say that something is right or wrong. Comedy allows you to see either side of the issue, and it also makes it more pleasant to be in the theatre, I think.

You once said that you thought comedy covered up the pain. Is that it?

Very much so. I think that you can go deeper being funny. I think that we have a limited vocabulary in terms of comedy. A lot of us think that comedy has to be farce, and I don't think that's true. I think that if you're writing character, comedy is humane.

Do you have a lot of pain to cover up?

Probably. But it's not mine, it's the characters', and I think they do.

In one of the essays in Bachelor Girls you said something about your therapist wanting you to think sometimes a little more seriously and to try to come to terms with things rather than covering them up in your life with comedy. Do you feel you're doing that in your plays?

I think the idea that something that's serious is not funny is ridiculous!

Or something that's funny not being serious either?

Yes, exactly. If you look at Chris Durang's plays, at the darkness of the vision, that's what makes them funny.

Do you think that the humor in your plays might ever cause people to underestimate what's really going on?

I thought that with Isn't It Romantic, which I thought was a far more commercial idea for a play than The Heidi Chronicles. You don't think, “I'm going to write a play about a feminist art historian who becomes sad, and it's going to become Barefoot in the Park.” Isn't It Romantic is more in the shape of a boulevard comedy, but it has serious things in it. A girl says in it, “I make choices based on an idea that doesn't exist anymore,” and that's interesting to me. Isn't it Woody Allen who says that if you write comedy you sit at the children's table, and if you write tragedy you sit at the adults’ table? There's something sort of flippant and easy about comedy. It's the hardest thing in the world; it's much harder. If you write a play which you think is funny and nobody's laughing—I've had that experience when I've been at previews of my own plays and I'm a lone voice in the wilderness going ha-ha-ha and nobody else is laughing—it is awful. It is truly awful. What's really scary is that, if you're comedically agile and suddenly you believe that you're a serious playwright, sometimes you can lose your comic voice. My favorite playwright is Chekhov, and I'm always taken with the fact that The Cherry Orchard is called a comedy.

Has success spoiled you?

No.

Has it changed you?

Well, in a sense. I remember, when I won the Pulitzer, Marsha Norman called me up and said, “It's like a rock,” and she was right. On days when I beat myself up or look at my new play and think it's not good, it's not this, it's not that, I think, “Just take it easy, Wendy, it's okay.” In that way, the success of the previous plays helps.

Has success freed you artistically? Is it easier or harder?

Every single play that you write comes along with the burden of when you're writing it, what the story is. When I was writing Isn't It Romantic, my second play. I talked to people about the burden of a second play. I think every single one has its own little story behind it.

How did you get your first play produced off-Broadway?

Actually, how my first play got done is very funny. When I got out of Mount Holyoke, I took writing classes at City College with Joseph Heller and Israel Horovitz, and I also had a job at the Board of Education taking inventory. It was a really good job. They sent me from place to place with a measuring stick, but what they didn't realize was that one Steelcase desk has the same measurements as another. Anyway, what happened was, I wrote a play called Any Woman Can't in Israel Horovitz's class, which happily none of you will ever see again. It was about a girl from Smith College who comes to New York and makes an unfortunate marriage. My mother, Lola, was walking down the street, and she ran into this woman Louise Roberts, who used to be the receptionist at the June Taylor School of the Dance, and Louise said to Lola, “What's Wendy doing?” Lola started hyperventilating and said, “Wendy, I don't know. She's not a lawyer, she's not married to a lawyer, she's crazy, and she's writing plays. I don't know.” I think Louise, really just to calm this woman down, said, “I work at a new dancing school, and it's across the hall from a new theatre called Playwrights Horizons, so why don't you give me Wendy's play and I'll give it to them.” And that's how my first play was read in 1973! It's true, and I've been associated with Playwrights ever since. This was even before André came to Playwrights; this is when Bob Moss ran the theatre. That's how that got done.

Then I went to the Yale School of Drama and, with Uncommon Women, I sent it out to twelve theatres. My favorite was when it got returned to me postage due from one theatre; that was nice. I sent it back to Playwrights Horizons; they had remembered me, and we did a reading of it, and then I rewrote the play from a one-act to a two-act form and submitted it to the O'Neill, and it was done that following summer at the O'Neill. I think the thing about playwriting is that the theatre world is small and you don't have to know Mike Nichols or whoever to become part of it. Your mother runs into the old receptionist from the June Taylor School of the Dance. I think you don't have to know the artistic director of the theatre; that's not how things really happen. I always advise playwrights that if someone wants to do a reading of your play; let your play be read, because you never know. It's as my mother says, “You never know who you're going to meet.” She's right.

Is it more difficult or easier for you to be produced now?

In some ways if you have been produced and well received, you sit there and you think, “Oh, this poor play, they're going to kill it.” You worry about what you're doing next in a way. I think what I'm good at is writing plays; as I said before, I love being inside theatres. I remember when Heidi was running I used to come to the theatre quite a bit just to hang out. But I don't know any playwright, really, who just writes plays now. Plays take a long time to write; they take a while to put on. Who knows if you got the right production, who knows if it will get good reviews; there's a lot of things going on. And filmwriting is interesting, television writing is interesting. They're different crafts from playwriting, but still I believe that ideas disseminate from plays. I think talking to different playwrights, you would have different answers about this.

Do you feel that you have less control with films?

You have much less control, because when you write a movie you are an employee. When you write a play you own it, so whenever The Heidi Chronicles is done in perpetuity it is my play with words by Wendy. If you're hired to write a movie, they can hire and fire you thirty-seven times. If I had sold The Heidi Chronicles to a movie studio as opposed to independent producers, and they decided they didn't like my script, they would have the right to fire me and take me off the project and say, “Why is this woman an art historian? Why doesn't she become a pilot? Days of Thunder did really well; why doesn't she become a race-car driver?”

Do your ideas of the plays ever change on the basis of seeing them done differently?

Not once it's finished. I think that you become so attached to plays that ultimately you have to withdraw and let them out into the universe.

What terrifies you?

Not being able to write. Not writing well. Knowing that the writing isn't as good as I want it to be, or thinking that I didn't take good enough care of my play. Or if someday I didn't care about it as much as I know you need to care about it; that would terrify me. Not writing plays would terrify me.

What about your process as a writer? Do you keep a journal; do you work on several scripts concurrently; do you rewrite a lot as you go along, or after you've worked on something?

My process is an arduous one; I always think I should become more efficient. I don't even work on a word processor. I'm driving a Model T. What I do is write in notebooks. I try not to write in my apartment, because the phone rings all the time, and if the phone wasn't ringing I'd make phone calls or I'd be at the refrigerator. So I go to the library and I write longhand in a college bound notebook, and then what I do is type it up on a typewriter. Revisions take quite a long time, and then I get it out to a typist. Plays tend to take me around nine months to write. I'm not as prolific as I would like to be; I always make mental notes to myself to become more prolific. But they end up with the same notes that say “Exercise more” and all of that stuff; they go to the same place. I'm just finishing a new play, and I had the idea for it in 1987 when I was finishing The Heidi Chronicles, but I never got around to it until last January. My plays tend to be semiautobiographical or come out of something that's irking me, and it's got to irk me long enough for me to commit to spend all that time alone writing and turn it into a play.

Once that first draft is there, what happens for you? How do you use the rehearsal process in terms of rewrites?

The first thing is getting that first draft out of my house and giving it to someone to read, because I'm somebody who could pick at the play endlessly, and no one would ever see it. When I was at the Yale Drama School, they taught us about this woman Hrotsvit of Gandersheim who was supposedly the first woman playwright; she was an eighth-century canonist, and she wrote over seven hundred plays that were never produced. She was called a closet dramatist. I'm someone who could become a closet dramatist, only I wouldn't have seven hundred plays; I'd have five plays that nobody ever saw that were rewritten twenty-seven times. So I have to make the leap of getting it out of my apartment and giving it to someone to read. I'm very lucky because I've had a home at a wonderful theatre called Playwrights Horizons, in New York, and I've worked with the same producer, André Bishop, for a long time now, over ten years or so. Actually, they did my first play in 1973, so it's longer than that. I know I can give the play to André. And I have a very good relationship with Dan Sullivan, who runs the Seattle Rep and directed The Heidi Chronicles; I'm going to give my new play to him. It's pretty much getting the play out of the house to somebody to look at.

Then the next thing for me—and this is pretty true for most playwrights—is putting together a reading of the play, getting some actors together and just hearing the play out loud, because plays are written to be heard. I remember the first reading of The Heidi Chronicles was in some ways the best that play ever was, because it was when the play was born and it was very exciting to me. But you have to be very careful, because you can't really judge a play by a reading, because nobody has to do anything. I remember a friend of mine, Peter Parnell, wrote a play called The Rise of Daniel Rocket in which a character flies, so when you have a reading and you have actors sitting onstage and the stage manager says, “He flies,” it sounds great, but basically you have to make this happen. I remember the same thing was true in The Heidi Chronicles; there's a scene in front of the Chicago Art Institute and, when I wrote it, it was out in front of the Chicago Art Institute in the rain. That's fine when someone reads this, but I remember Dan Sullivan said to me, “Well, how do you think we are going to do this in an off-Broadway theatre?” I said, “That's your problem.” So there's that. You have an initial reading and you get a sense of your play.

I'll give you the history of what I did with Heidi. After that reading we did it as a workshop in Seattle with a two-week rehearsal and a three-day production period, and again it was really about the play. It's always been about the text; it's never been about “Boy, if we really fixed this up we can get it to Cher” or “If I fix this up, maybe it's a Broadway baby.” That's never occurred to me either. It's always been, let's make this text as good as I can make it, and I want to tell the story; I want to tell it as well as I can. That's really what the workshop period in Seattle was about. And then I had another reading in New York, and then we went into production. My plays get revised quite a bit. I think it's because I don't write from an outline; I just start writing, I just start letting those characters talk, which again may be very different for different playwrights. I know that some playwrights have every scene on a different notecard, and they know exactly where everything's going. I'm in a state of “whoopee”; I just want to see what's going to happen to them.

Would you say, thinking of The Heidi Chronicles specifically, that that play changed substantially from that first read-through to the final product as it was seen in New York and around the country?

That's interesting, because the structure of that play stayed the same. What happened was that a half an hour was cut out of the play; it was just too long. The speech that she gave at the Art Institute, for instance, the speech that she gives to the women's group, used to go on for eight pages; she just went on and on and on until the play became an hour on this woman—but I had a good time writing it. So in that way it changed, but the structure didn't change that much.

I'm wondering what you think about the concept of a female aesthetic and how you might relate to that.

Boy, it's hard about female aesthetics. I remember when I was at college at Mount Holyoke and we were taking a course—it was the first actual feminism course given at Mount Holyoke—and we were reading about sexual politics and Freud and studying inner space and outer space and all of that stuff, and I just thought, “I hate this.” I think that, being a writer who has come of age as a woman, you have had a different language, you have had a different experience. My plays are generally about women talking to each other. The sense of action is perhaps different than if I had come of age as a male playwright. Women are very good talkers. I remember when I first wrote Uncommon Women, which is a play about a reunion of Mount Holyoke graduates, I was a student at Yale and we were studying a lot of Jacobean drama. To me, basically, it was men kissing the skulls of women and then dropping dead from the poison, and I thought to myself, “Gee, this is really not familiar to me. It's not within my realm of experience.” Simultaneously, there were all these posters for Deliverance around New Haven. I thought to myself, “I'd really like to write the flip side of Deliverance.” I worked backwards and thought, “I want to see an all-female curtain call in the basement of the Yale School of Drama.” It came from that. So in a way I do and I don't believe there's a feminine aesthetic.

Is it true that the new play that you are currently working on has a different structure?

All my plays have episodic structures; they all break down into around eight scenes. For me they're fun to write because basically I know that within ten pages I'm out of this scene—so I'm not stuck there. In some ways you can move the action forward in that way, and also in a way you can make the action and the storytelling elliptical. I'm not that good at storytelling. I remember that, when I was at Yale, Richard Gilman was the playwriting teacher, and we'd bring in our plays, and he'd always say afterwards, “Well, I like the language.” I've always thought that if I kept the language bright enough and the comedy bright enough no one could tell nothing's happened! One good way is to keep changing scenes. I'm also somebody who grew up watching a lot of television. It's interesting, because most playwrights are trying to break form and create new forms, but I'm trying to write a traditional living room play because I wanted to see if I could get these people on and off, and it's very hard to do. They have to say, “Oh, excuse me, I think the phone is ringing” or “Oh, I think I'll make some coffee now,” and you try to think of the most ingenious ways you can devise for people to say good-bye or hello. At least when you write episodic plays you just cut to the next scene. A lot of my episodic scenes always end in singing and dancing!

There is a real craftsmanship to your language, and that's usually true in comedy.

What you try to do, especially with comedy, is not write the underneath. If you're going to have somebody say, “I'm so lonely,” you're going to punch it right at the moment, maybe at the funniest moment in the play. I always thought the best comic moment in The Heidi Chronicles was the saddest—when Heidi brings all of her belongings to the AIDS unit and Peter goes through her books, looks at Janson's history of art and Salvador Dali, and says, “Thank you, we don't have any of these.” I always thought that allowed me the possibility to become even sadder, so the precision of that moment would upset me if it wasn't there. Sometimes I do look at playwriting very much like a craft and see myself first as an artist and then as a craftsperson, especially building comedy, I think.

Do you think, since The Heidi Chronicles deals with this, that the contemporary woman can have a successful ongoing relationship with a man and a successful and engrossing career simultaneously?

Sure.

Okay, next question!

I don't know. I mean it takes one to know one, I guess.

There's a lot of talk about either/or and not wanting it to be either/or, but yet there doesn't seem to be any alternative that shows a positive ongoing relationship between a man and a woman.

I know that; it's interesting, because I thought about that even writing my new play. I thought, “God, these women are really out there; there's nothing sort of normal going on here!” I think it is possible, but I think you get into trouble when you think there is a paradigm or something for having a happy life. I think different people are able to do different things. Some people are incredibly well-organized, some people are not; some people are very fortunate to have met a wonderful and loving mate, some people are less fortunate. Some people have extremely fulfilling careers; some people don't find that. But I think where you get into trouble is saying, “I must have all of this and if I haven't had all of this I've done badly.” That's a mistake, I think.

In regard to the feminist movement (thinking about that wonderful speech that used to be a half an hour and now is shorter in The Heidi Chronicles), do you feel that women are standing alone, sort of stranded? Do you feel that feminism is an idea that failed, or is it still with us?

God, there was a picture in the New York Times today of those eight congresswomen walking into the Senate to protest the handling of Anita Hill's accusations, and I found myself very moved by it. There was something about seeing those women together. I think with women, God knows, that it's still a real issue. It's interesting when you deal with younger women and they say, “Oh, are you the f word, feminist?” and it's a bad thing to be. I'll go to panels and say that I am, that I can't imagine not being; how could you say, “Oh, I don't believe in the rights of women”? I'll never forget after The Heidi Chronicles I went out to dinner with a friend and his girlfriend who was first in her class at Radcliffe. She was a twenty-six-year-old girl who now is at the Columbia Business School. She went out with me and my roommate from Mount Holyoke, who were both forty, and her soon-to-be husband. She said to me, “Well, I loved your play, Wendy. It was so funny and good, but I have one question. What was the problem?” And I sort of thought, “Well, gee, we must have done good work if you don't think there's any problem anymore.” But then again, maybe there's a big problem and it's still out there.

The f word seems to be one of the most highly charged words in our language these days.

It's very charged. I know The Heidi Chronicles was a controversial play among many feminists. It was a play where some people thought I had sold out, because she had a baby at the end and I was saying that all women must have babies—run out and adopt a Panamanian tonight! I know that this happened, but from my point of view, what's political is that this play exists. What's political is that we can talk about this play that's about us—like it, don't like it; it's there, it exists, and that's the forward motion. When Uncommon Women was first done and got better reviews than The Heidi Chronicles, it ran for two and a half weeks at the Marymount Theatre in 1978 because commercial producers felt (and this was a play with Glenn Close, Jill Eikenberry, Swoosie Kurtz) an all-women's play could not be commercial. So that's how much things have changed in ten years.

Could you talk a little bit about what Heidi's choice meant to you?

The Heidi Chronicles ends with Heidi adopting a baby alone. In my mind, when I was writing the play, that was always the end of the play. I remember that when I was coming to the end of the play I had called my agent, and she told me that an actress friend of mine had recently adopted a baby, and I thought, “That's right, that's what this is about.” I would have changed the ending if it had been done in larger spaces before Broadway, much as August Wilson's plays are done, because I might have ended the play with her lecturing to fill the space, to bookend it. She would have still adopted the baby, but the final image might have been her lecturing. But I didn't have the time to go and do that. I always thought that I wouldn't change her; that was the right choice for Heidi, for her as a person. I know it was quite controversial. I talked at Cornell last year, and these two women art historians I met lit into me for forty-five minutes. Even as I explained it, they just stood there and said, “No, no, you're wrong. No, no.” I can see where it would be controversial, and I could even see where me as an audience person, if I hadn't written that play, me as somebody who would identify with that generation in Heidi, could have seen that play and could have said, “Give me a break! Adopt a baby from Panama? No thank you.” I could have gotten angry at it too. But as the playwright, and as someone who was logging that journey, to me it was the right journey for her. My new play is romantically uplifting; it's about the possibility of that anyway.

Do you think that because you are a woman playwright people expect you to speak for women in a way that a male playwright doesn't have to deal with?

Absolutely, and also because I deal with feminist topics. Yes, you're always asked, “Are you a feminist, and how does this affect your work?” It would be nice if someone asked a man, “What are your feelings about women?” I guess they don't have to have them; I don't know. But it really would be an interesting thing to ask, because I'm asked both about men and women. “Why aren't there better men in The Heidi Chronicles?” I thought, “Why am I in charge of this? Ask David Mamet.”

Do you think it's easier for women to be produced in general?

I think it's opened up. I've been on a lot of grant committees and stuff, and I think many more plays by women are being produced and many more women are writing plays. I think the atmosphere is much better.

Do you see the audience for plays getting smaller and more refined and more particularized over the years, or do you think theatre is always sort of struggling on the edge but always there?

I think you always have to look at theatre from the widest possible notion. You have to look at it in America as a national art form. You certainly can't just look at Broadway; look at Washington. Look at the Arena Stage; look at the Kennedy Center; look at the smaller theatres. That's a wide variety. For the people who write dialogue of a certain kind, there's nothing like writing for the theatre; there's nothing like sitting through a preview when you're there with the director and the set designer, and it's a collaboration, and you're going to fix it. I think that for audiences, too, live theatre communicates in a particular way. It's quite interesting from my point of view that Murphy Brown is now pregnant and having a child alone. That's interesting because that's like The Heidi Chronicles three years ago. I think there are things you can do in theatre that you can't do anyplace else. And also, theatre is the voice of an individual writer. Movies are really a director's medium. Television is about producing; it's about manufacturing, though very well, and there is certainly, God knows, beautifully written television. But in terms of just the voice of a writer, that is most dominant in the theatre, I think.

Have you ever wanted to direct, or to direct one of your own plays?

I really wouldn't be a very good director. I like the collaboration. Oddly enough, I've choreographed. I choreographed a rock musical version of Das Rheingold in a theatre that burned down. There was a theatre in New York called the Mercer Arts Theatre, and we were doing this play. Meatloaf was in it, and one day I came to rehearsal and the building had fallen down! I thought it was because of the musical version of Das Rheingold. I'm not very visually oriented. I really do respect actors. I think there is a real process, and when you've written a play and the actor says, “Well, what do you want here?” you just want to answer, “Oh, it's just funny; be funny.” As a director, it's more complicated.

Are there favorite actors that you have?

There's one actress, Alma Cuervo, who's been in every play of mine. She was at Yale when I was at Yale, and she was in Uncommon Women; she made the phone call to the doctor. She played Janie in Isn't It Romantic, and she recently was in The Heidi Chronicles. Unfortunately, I don't think there's a part for her in my new play, which makes me worry about it. But certainly one uses the same people. I adore Swoosie Kurtz; I think she's great; I'd do anything with Swoosie. When we did the first reading of Heidi, a lot of the women who were in it were people who had been in Uncommon Women. You tend to turn to the same people in a way. I love Joan Allen and Peter Freedman; I think they're just great.

Is there a kind of dialogue and an understanding, a vocabulary, that develops that you want to share with them?

Absolutely. Particularly when you're writing a comedy, because you want the people who trust your work and know that what's funny comes from the character as opposed to what comes from being, quote, funny. I'll never forget when I went to see a production of Uncommon Women in Chicago, and the director had directed the actors every time something was funny to wink, and it was like everybody had this astigmatism. It was just terrible and I thought, “Why don't you trust the material, why is everybody winking here?” So you want people who know what works, who know that the writer has really thought about this carefully.

Is there something that is killing the theatre? What are the forces that you think are most destructive today?

It's very hard to make a living in the theatre. It's very hard to be an artist in America, frankly. I remember I won a Guggenheim when it was time to rewrite Isn't It Romantic, and I was so happy. It gave me such a sense of self, a feeling of “do this.” And I remember that it was for eighteen thousand dollars, which was to me in 1984 an amount of money; but you think about how much a first-year lawyer at a reputable law firm makes.

And you had an advanced degree and were like a doctor.

Yeah, I think it's very hard, and I think, in terms of theatre, not only is it hard for actors to make a living but it's hard for everybody. It's hard for playwrights. You try casting a play during pilot season, and it's very hard to find an actor. In London, the television and theatre industry are all in the same city; here, people begin to choose between New York and Los Angeles, and at some point thirty-five-year-old people with children or whatever need to decide. I was watching the television show Sisters the other night, and there was Swoosie and there was David Dukes. These are great stage actors, not just good, so one has to think about that.

A lot of people, obviously, have uneasy relationships with critics in the theatre, and certainly there have been a lot of discussions about the relationship of the press to theatre. What do you feel about the critic's role in theatre today?

It's very difficult, because on a scale from one to ten on a play that you've written, you always care ten. As soon as you care nine, you're out of the ballpark; and even if you care ten, that doesn't mean you're in the ballpark, that just means you can get your heart broken even worse. So on the night the critics come, you see all these people coming to your play to judge it or have an opinion, and it's very scary. I think it is part of the process of putting on a play. What always interests me is that when I speak at colleges they always ask about critics, and I always think critics are part of a process. Plays take a long time: you have to sit through a month of auditions to put on a play, you have to sit through five days of technical rehearsal. Critics come on one night, the reviews come out, and I wish that people understood that more; but it is how opinion on the play is disseminated. What happens is, often one wants plays to have a life so that audiences can have an opinion on them, too. What's scary about the critical process is that it is often new plays that are the most vulnerable to critics. If a Neil Simon play doesn't get particularly good notices, it's probably produced by a management that can pour enough money into it. People know the playwright, the play will have a life. It will hurt his feelings. I'm sure, but the play will have a life. With a new play by a young playwright that nobody knows about, it opens at an off-Broadway theatre in New York, and one doesn't know if that play's going to be done again or what's going to happen to that playwright.

Unfortunately, what seems to be happening in cities around the country is that one critical voice is taking the most powerful position.

The Heidi Chronicles didn't get particularly good notices when it went on tour around the country, but because the play came in with all of those awards and I went on Hello St. Paul and Midday Boston, we were able to sell the play, I believe in getting audiences to come and see plays.

Because your work is often autobiographical, do reviews affect it?

It's hard. Sometimes you don't read them. If you know that they are bad and it's for no other purpose than to hurt your feelings, why would you read them? So it depends. If it's going to concern the life of your play, then you must read them. If everybody says the same thing and these are intelligent people who have come to your play, then something's not getting across; so I think that's important. But it's hard. Of course it hurts your feelings, it has to.

What's the worst thing that you can think of happening to you in the theatre?

We talked about this earlier. It would be if I stopped writing plays. I would just be deeply disappointed in myself. I wrote a musical called Miami that didn't work out. We did it upstairs at Playwrights Horizons, and I cared every bit as much about Miami as about The Heidi Chronicles, but it didn't work. I believe plays have lives of their own and they have their own stories, and this play was just something where everything went wrong. When Miami didn't work, I had my niece come over and put everything related to Miami in the closet. I just put it away and only now am I beginning to deal with it a little bit; it's very painful, very painful.

When something like that happens to you in your process, do you think someday you'll take it out of the closet and fix it, or is it over and on to the next project?

I'm thinking of fixing that now or doing something with it. I think sometimes it's over and sometimes it's not. If you see the right place for it, there might be something.

In musicals, often a song keeps getting shifted from show to show before it finds a home. Do you ever feel something that didn't work in one play might be in the next one?

All the time. When we were doing Isn't It Romantic with Gerald Gutierrez, who's a wonderful director, he had me cut various lines because in fact Isn't It Romantic was too funny. You couldn't get to the character. There was one line that Janie said, when a man said to her, “You're clutching your purse.” She said, “I have valuables.” Gerry said, “You have to cut this line.” And I said to him, “Gerry, this is important to the zeitgeist of the play and the hubris of the character.” And he said, “What are you bullshitting about? You won't cut your joke.” And I said, “Well, that's right.” So we cut the joke. That joke is in The Heidi Chronicles, and I'll never forget when Gerry came to see the play and there was this howl when he heard the joke. You never throw away a good joke. Hold onto it for years to come.

When you are writing, do you imagine an audience? Do you feel the play is one half of a dialogue you're having with an audience and, if that's true, who is the other half?

Sometimes I'll listen to music that I associate with the play; or I imagine moments of the play, and that makes me laugh actually. I don't know if I imagine the audience; that would make me nervous. I imagine the play itself and the production but, with my plays, I'm someone who sort of hangs around ladies’ rooms for word of mouth all the time. That's one of the problems with becoming well known; suddenly they know who's loitering in the ladies’ room. So you get, “I think it's wonderful. Would you like to meet my nephew?” And I'm thinking, “No, I don't. I just want to hear what you have to say about my play.” But it's very interesting to see who comes to your plays, too.

Do you find that it's harder now, again because of the success, just to find the quiet time and space to work?

Sure, a little bit. For someone who likes to escape writing, there are many more ways to escape, and you can say they're important. It's not like I'm off with a girl friend; I'm doing something serious and good, but what I'm really not at is my desk. So there's that, too.

Do you think a Jewish identity and a Jewish cultural up-bringing inform your art in any way?

Oh, very much so. My work extremely so, in terms of humor very much so, and in terms of a pathos, too, I think. It's interesting writing about Jewish subject matter as well. Miami was very much about Jews; it was about Miami Beach in 1959. There's a woman in it named Kitty Katz, and her boyfriend is named Murray Murray, and someone took me out after they saw the show and they said, “Wendy, can't you make this about Irish people? This isn't good for the Jews.” I thought it would have to be worse when Kitty Katz comes out as an Irish woman! But it was an insight into what Philip Roth goes through. There is a part of me that thinks The Heidi Chronicles was taken more seriously because it was about a Gentile girl from Chicago. It wasn't about Wendy with the hips from New York, even if Wendy with the hips from New York had the same emotional life. It's a cynical point of view, but I partially believe that to be true. It was also interesting for me in The Heidi Chronicles to write Scoop Rosenbaum: I got to be the smart Jewish boy who tormented me all my life. I thought, “Now I get to be you,” and it was fabulous; it was like revenge of the nerds. My new play is very much about being Jewish.

Do you find, going around the country to different cities that have different population makeups, that audiences react to your work differently?

Well, I saw Isn't It Romantic in Tokyo, and it's the most Jewish of all my plays. It's about me and my mother basically, and it opens with this woman in a tie-dyed leotard singing “Sunrise, Sunset” to her daughter, asking her when she's going to get married. There I was in Tokyo, and this Japanese woman came out singing “Sunrise, Sunset” in Japanese, and I thought to myself, “That's my mother; good God, how weird!” It was really strange, but the play got the same laughs in Tokyo as it did in New York. Japanese audiences are not vociferous and what's interesting about them also is that they are 80 percent female. Women go to the theatre a lot, and a single woman in Tokyo over twenty-five is known as “a Christmas cake after Christmas.” What played there was the emotional values of the play and the mother and daughter.

Do people in your life who know that your work is autobiographical react in ways that are different from the rest of us when they see themselves onstage?

Well, my mother came to the opening of Isn't It Romantic and said, “Wendy, where did you get those shoes?” Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. Oddly enough, in some ways The Heidi Chronicles is my least autobiographical play. In that play I'm more like the gay pediatrician in terms of his humor and in terms of his way of dealing with the world, except that I'm not him either. It is my coming of age, and my times, but the people in it have the least to do with me. But I was at the women's group where they screamed to me, “Either you shave your legs or you don't!” I remember that distinctly.

You've been writing a series of essays for various magazines, and the personal nature of those causes you to get a lot of interesting mail. Do you find that people sort of want you to be what they want you to be? How do you respond to that?

When you write with a personal voice, you become immediately accessible so that people assume that they know you. Bachelor Girls has a lot in it about my mother and my brother and a bad affair and all of that. It's interesting for a playwright to use that “I” persona, because you can't have it onstage; it's got to become somebody else. In a way that's sort of fun, but on the other hand, people really do assume a familiarity with you, and they come up and talk to me in a way I don't think they do with other playwrights. I recently have lost some weight, and a stranger came up to me on the street and said, “Wendy, you've lost four hundred pounds!” I just thought, “Who are you? Why are you talking this way to me? I mean, nobody does this to August Wilson. I'm sure you wouldn't dare. Who does this to Marsha Norman?” I get these people; they're my special friends. In a way it's very nice because you feel a community, you feel in touch. There's this one essay, which I think is the best one in there, called “Jean Harlow's Wedding Night”; it's about growing up being funny, what that is, dealing with a bad personal experience and becoming compulsively funny to cover up the upset. That's been interesting because I walk down the street and women come up to me and say, “That happened to me.” That is nice, except then you feel sad because you think, “Gee, in some ways I wish that it had only happened to me.”

Do you get a lot of requests from young playwrights about how to get started? Do you try to help them, and how?

I do. I've taught at Columbia and at NYU, and I work a lot with a group called the Young Playwrights Festival. We just had our tenth anniversary in New York; we do new plays by playwrights under eighteen. It's a national competition, and we get over a thousand plays. I think that's very important, to do that and to keep the life of the theatre alive. Also, I think a young woman or a young man believes they can become a playwright because you became a playwright; it becomes a possibility. For some reason, I go to girls’ schools. I've spoken at every girls’ school in New York. I'm the only person who flew from the Golan Heights to give the commencement speech at the Chapin School; I think that that was a first. I think it's very important because you basically look at someone and you say, “Gee, this isn't a person in black with the fur and the earrings; this is an accessible person and this is her job; this is what she does. If she was able to express herself in this way, then I can do that, too.” I think that's great, really good, because Wendy never came to my school when I was in high school.

There actually weren't very many Wendys to do that back then.

Right, exactly.

Is there anyone that you would say has been a really powerful influence on you and your work, other than your family? Another artist, another writer?

I'm very influenced by my colleagues. I met Chris Durang when I was at the Yale Drama School, and he's been a great friend of mine. It's the closeness that you have to somebody who is also writing. Those sorts of friendships with people in the theatre—Peter Parnell I feel that way about, too—are very supportive at difficult times. I look at Betty Comden, who was in my play Isn't It Romantic, and now she's just won the Kennedy Center Honors, and I think, “When Betty was doing this in the fifties, it can't have been easy to have been Betty.” I look at her and I think, “There is a woman of great gift and dignity.” And André Bishop at Playwrights Horizons has been important for what he's given me and what he's given to other theatre writers too. And the directors I've worked with: Dan, and Gerry Gutierrez, Steven Rubin.

How involved are you with the director during the rehearsal process?

The most important thing, actually, is working with the director, with someone you share a vision with, because if you sit down for an initial conversation and you're not on the same wavelength, it's not going to change. It's not going to get better, it can only go downhill from there. I tend to go to rehearsals just because I like to hear the play and I like to work during the rehearsal process. Any comments that I have I speak through the director, and he or she then speaks to the company. What I like about plays is that you can be around; when you write movies, you're not there at all, it's not up to you. The process of plays is, it begins with the writer, and then goes to the director, the director gives it to the actors, and the actors give it back to the audience, and ultimately it's about stage management. But it's very important to have a good relationship with the director.

When you're writing a play, how much of the world of the play beyond the words do you see? Do you know what your characters look like, where they go when they leave the stage, what the surroundings are like?

Oh, gosh, they do start filling up my life. I wrote The Heidi Chronicles in London on a grant, and I remember it was a happy time. I was living in this horrible studio apartment with turned-over flowerpots for the decor. It was a place called the Nell Gwynn House or something. It was really awful. I had this grant for “midcareer stimulation.” I didn't know what that was, but I was very happy. I remember writing the wedding scene at the Pierre in London, and I had never even been to a wedding at the Pierre, but I'd heard that it was the nicest place for a Jewish girl to get married. You can see why I've never been there! But there was something wonderful about being in that studio in London and imagining the Pierre and having for company Scoop and Heidi and Peter. I loved it. So in that way the characters do become real sometimes during the period that I'm writing them; I sort of merge with them in a way. That's both good and bad. Some nights I would see The Heidi Chronicles and be very moved by it and think, “I'm still that woman. I still feel stranded, too.” And then some nights, she'd say, “Oh, I feel stranded,” and I'd think, “Oh, just shut up and be happy. Stop whining.” The characters become quite real to me, and I enjoy them. The plays become fun when they stop being autobiography. The characters who are the larger colors become more fun to me. I loved Kitty Katz because, in a sense, that someone like me who's somewhat demure got to be Kitty Katz for a while is great. Swoosie Kurtz in Uncommon Women, the girl who says “I tasted my menstrual blood”: that was great fun because I knew I'd never have to get up and say it. But it was fun to do.

What do you think about improvisation as a technique, not as an acting technique, but for you as a playwright? Do you ever like to see actors in character improvising and use that, or do you find that gets in the way?

Not really, no. I think in some ways, especially with comedy, actually I should loosen up, but I find the work tends to be very precise. It works for certain reasons, so I'm not that interested in that, really.

Can you tell us a little more about your new play?

It's hard to talk about the new play because I always think that if you talk too much about these things you don't know what will happen. The leads in the play are in their forties and fifties, so that the style is different. The writing is slightly different; it's more acerbic than my other plays, it's not as warm. I guess the model for it is more of a Chekhovian piece. I think it's an interesting play. It's not really done at the moment, but I'm happy to have written it, so I'll see.

How important to your development was your time at Yale Drama School?

For me it was very important. I wasn't happy when I was there. I was very unhappy because drama school's a very hard thing. You're there for three years, and then you don't know what's going to become of you. It's not as if you get out of Yale and there's an ad in the Times that says, “Playwright wanted: ＄80,000 a year plus benefits.” Plus you know it's very competitive; you have no idea if you're going to make a living, you have no idea if you're talented. So it was very hard for me, but looking back, for me it was very good that I went, because it made me feel one part of a community, meeting Chris Durang and Alma Cuervo and Ted Tally and all of those people and coming of age with them. Also, it made me take myself seriously as a theatre person, which was important to me because otherwise I maybe probably wouldn't have.

You've done a lot of travelling and talked to people all over the world. Do you have a sense that playwrights are regarded differently abroad from the way they are here, or is it pretty much the same?

That's interesting. In England, people will go to the new Tom Stoppard play, they'll go to the new Stephen Poliakoff play, and it's not like a hit-or-miss thing: “Boy, he wrote a bomb; we don't care about him.” I wish that was more true here. I wish it was less of “Is it a hit or is it a miss?” Theatre writing is a long career. You want a life in the theatre. You don't want: “Oh boy, she had one hit, let's dump her” or “Oh boy, she's a hit machine.” What you want is for an artist to evolve. Even a career like Neil Simon's is a very successful career, but he is somebody who keeps writing plays.

Do you see a lot of young playwrights now who quit just for that reason—because there isn't such a market?

Well, there is such an alternative in television and film and who that reaches. Many more people will be talking about Murphy Brown and that baby than The Heidi Chronicles and that baby.