Born in Brooklyn on 18 October 1950, Wendy Wasserstein has drawn on features of her family life to inspire all four of her major plays. She was the youngest of four children, including two other daughters—one of whom became a high executive at Citicorp, while another married a doctor and raised three children. “She did the best,” the “bachelor girl” playwright once sardonically announced,¹ in comparing the siblings whose lives would be transmuted into The Sisters Rosensweig (1992). The Wassersteins themselves were very solidly and successfully middle class—“a sort of traditional family, eccentric but traditional,” the playwright later recalled. Morris was a successful textile manufacturer; and among the fabrics that he patented was velveteen, which Holly Kaplan's father has invented, according to Uncommon Women and Others (177). In Isn't It Romantic (1983), Janie Blumberg's father manufactures stationery. Wendy Wasserstein's bohemian and liberated mother, Lola, was a devotee of theater and of dance classes, which Tasha Blumberg, the aerobically inclined mother in Isn't It Romantic, continues to take.²

When Wendy was twelve, the family moved to the Upper East Side of Manhattan, reinforcing the expectations of high academic and professional achievement with the presumptions of a future combining maternity and domesticity. Beginning at the Yeshivah of Flatbush, she hit the ground running, and already by the second grade, she realized that she was funny: “I was good company … an elementary school Falstaff.” She graduated from the Calhoun School and went on to major in history, class of 1971, at Mount Holyoke College. (The eponymous protagonist of The Heidi Chronicles [1988] becomes an art historian.) Wasserstein got a master's degree in creative writing at City University of New York in 1973 (studying with playwright Israel Horovitz and novelist Joseph Heller) and then studied at the Yale School of Drama, from which she received a Master of Fine Arts in 1976. Drawing on her undergraduate experience, she had submitted a thesis play at Yale, a one-act acorn that would grow into the Obie-winning oak entitled Uncommon Women and Others.³ Moving back to New York City, which is where the two young women in Isn't It Romantic inaugurate a similar stage in their lives, Wasserstein was soon recognized as among the most sparkling playwrights of her generation.

Luck did not hurt: when Uncommon Women was elevated to the Public Broadcasting System's Great Performances series a year after opening at the Marymount Manhattan Theatre, her Yale classmate Meryl Streep played Leilah, replacing another soon-to-be legendary actress, Glenn Close. Talent mattered too: Wasserstein's first play won the Village Voice Off-Broadway Award;⁴ her third to be staged won the Pulitzer Prize for drama and the Antoinette Perry (or Tony) Award, plus honors from the New York Drama Critics' Circle, the Outer Critics Circle and the Drama Desk—just about everything but the Heisman Trophy. The Heidi Chronicles was also her first to prove Broadway-bound. And when The Sisters Rosensweig opened there, the character of Sara Goode was played by Jane Alexander, whom President Clinton soon appointed to head the National Endowment for the Arts. Though Wasserstein's total output has not been huge (and has inspired little extensive scholarly criticism), she merits attention for another reason besides the recognition and acclaim that her gifts have elicited. Perhaps more than in the work of any major American dramatist of this century (even including Clifford Odets, for example), the vicissitudes of Jewish identity should be included among the primary themes of Wendy Wasserstein's work.

Its ethnicity is not emphatic. The author herself has not advanced a communal agenda, nor does she insist that her dramaturgy be used for Jewish purposes. She has not assigned herself the responsibility of speaking for the Jewish people—or even necessarily to it. The first noteworthy Jewish American leader, Mordecai Manuel Noah, also happened to be a playwright, yet his melodramas were not overtly placed in the service of Jewish interests and were even barren of Jewish characters.⁵ Although Wasserstein may not have Jewish audiences (or critics) primarily in mind and does not wish to be judged primarily as a Jewish playwright, neither is she Lillian Hellman, whose plays betray no obvious signs of Jewish origins, idiom, or purposes. Wasserstein is also a product of the Zeitgeist. Born five years after Bess Myerson of the Sholom Aleichem Cooperatives Houses of the Bronx had become Miss America, Wasserstein is heir to the legitimation of ethnicity—including Jewish ethnicity. Born five years before Will Herberg's Protestant Catholic Jew (1955) inflated his own Judaism to tripartite status as one of the nation's three presumptive if unofficial faiths, she grew up in an era of frictionless integration into American society, in which its Jews did not feel in galut.

Unlike the bleak desperation that animates the Berger family during the Great Depression in Odets' Awake and Sing! (1935), unlike the rapacity that motivates the Hubbards in the ruined, post-Reconstruction South of Hellman's The Little Foxes (1939), Wasserstein's Jews need not worry where the next meal is coming from or how best to stay ahead in an ambience haunted by the experience and the fear of poverty. In the Group Theatre of the 1930s, the edgy characters played by Jules Garfinkle (a.k.a. John Garfield) faced the problem of how to make money. For Larry “the Liquidator” Garfinkle (called Larry Garfield in the movie version of Jerry Sterner's 1989 play, Other People's Money), the problem was how to make his money make money. The trajectory is thus sharply upward, from the working-class Bergers to the lower-middle-class Lomans in Death of a Salesman (1949) to the sisters Rosensweig, whose roles in life range from an international banker based in London to an international travel writer living in exotic Asia to a leader of the Temple Beth El women's auxiliary. Its Sisterhood may not be powerful, but at least it is based in posh Newton, Massachusetts. Theatrical history thus reflects the gravity-defying upward mobility of American Jewry. It is almost too good to be true that the only brother to the sisters Wasserstein became a Master of the Universe, using other people's money to specialize in leveraged buyouts. In 1988 Bruce Wasserstein was an architect of the ＄25 billion RJR-Nabisco merger that capped the buccaneering, let's-make-a-deal capitalism of the Reagan era.⁶ No wonder his sister's characters, who have attended the best schools and have inherited the comforts of young urban professionals, come out ahead of the progeny of the Bergers and the Lomans.

The accident of birth also made Wasserstein the beneficiary of enhanced sensitivity to the female condition and to the injustices of gender. “I can't understand not being a feminist,” she admits,⁷ having turned thirteen when Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique was published and “the problem with no name” specified. If the perplexities of peoplehood do not spring to mind when considering the thrust of Wasserstein's work, that is because, though multifarious identities need not be incompatible, she writes far more directly as a woman than as a Jew. The perspective that her plays offer is feminist (and not Judaic); and in them feminist speeches are given even to men like the faux furrier Mervyn Kant, who punctures the cliché that Jews Do Not Drink: “I think it's a myth made up by our mothers to persuade innocent women that Jewish men make superior husbands. In other words, it's worth it to put up with my crankiness, my hypochondria, my opinions on world problems, because I don't drink.”⁸ Some evidence suggests that Heidi Holland herself is not Jewish, and the contemporary challenge that she faces would be familiar to virtually any young professional American woman thrown off balance when the rules of engagement keep shifting.

Though the social problem that Isn't It Romantic addresses is defined with a New York Jewish accent, Janie is not exactly looking (in theater critic Carolyn Clay's pun) for Mr. Good Bar Mitzvah. The protagonist is deft at playing back the mixed messages that Tasha Blumberg, who has already inhaled the air of emancipation even as she was raising Janie, has communicated to her daughter. “Mother, think about it,” Janie announces. “Did you teach me to marry a nice Jewish doctor and make chicken for him? You order up breakfast from a Greek coffee shop every morning. Did you teach me to go to law school and wear gray suits at a job that I sort of like every day from nine to eight? You run out of here in leg warmers and tank tops to dancing school. Did you teach me to compromise and lie to the man I live with and say I love you when I wasn't sure? You live with your partner; you walk Dad to work every morning.”⁹ It is hard not to detect here a note of envy for an earlier generation that at its luckiest managed to combine intimacy with security and to reconcile expanded vocational and avocational possibilities with conventional middle-class comforts.

The plays of Wendy Wasserstein are populated with Jews but are even more frequently filled with women. Her oeuvre has constituted, according to one critic, “comedies of feminine survival that explore the ambiguous effectiveness of the women's movement during the past quarter of a century. Using the pattern of her own life as a paradigm, she has dramatized with a sharply satiric wit the problematic intersection of the individual experience and the collective feminist ideology that would explain and transform it.”¹⁰ Though the special burden of expectation for women to marry is a recurrent theme in Wasserstein's work, an even more special burden that is placed upon Jewish women privileges marriage within the faith. World Jewry is not even a blip on the demographic screen, no bigger than the margin of statistical error in the Chinese census;¹¹ and continuity requires philoprogenitiveness and endogamy, values that are not quintessential either to the ideology of feminism or to the pleasures of romantic love. The pressure comes from parents who do not want their own child to be aharon ha-aharonim (the last of the last), a terminal Jew; and that anxiety is erratically conveyed, with mixed and uncertain results.

Thus Holly Kaplan phones (or pretends to phone) a young Jewish physician in Minneapolis, but fears to establish such a connection even as she seeks it. thus Janie Blumberg is comically fixed up with a Russian cab driver. And isn't it romantic that Heidi Holland, though probably not Jewish (but not specified as a gentile either), cannot escape from the clutches of Scoop Rosenbaum, even at the raucous Jewish wedding that ratifies his compromising decision to marry someone else. In the controversial climax to the play, Heidi has adopted a daughter and become a single mother. Thus Gorgeous Teitelbaum wishes that her sister's loneliness might be cured, and tells Tess Goode, her niece: “I always said to mother, if only Sara would meet a furrier or a dentist.” The fifty-four year-old Sara is permitted to wonder whether her one-night-stand gentleman caller merits a longer commitment. “You're just like all the other men I went to high school with,” she tells Merv Kant. “You're smart, you're a good provider, you read The Times every day, you started running at fifty to recapture your youth, you worry a little too much about your health, you thought about having affairs, but you never actually did it, and now that she's departed, your late wife, Roslyn, is a saint.”¹² Men like him and Scoop Rosenbaum and perhaps even the unseen and unheard Doctor Mark Silverstein have the right business and professional credentials to embody success and security. But they also threaten the autonomy and egalitarianism that a feminist vision encourages and an expanding economy sanctions.

The ideology of the women's movement can collide with the dictates of patriarchal Judaism. Though Wasserstein's writing betrays no awareness of such tension, not even her most militant sisters would confuse a conclave of the Union for Traditional Conservative Judaism with the boys-will-be-boys raunchiness of a Tailhook convention. Religious faith and ritual have nevertheless become diminished in the observably Jewish but unobservant families that are dissected in Wasserstein's satire. Few can be classified among the “good ga davened,” whom Holly Kaplan, the lone Jew among the femmes savantes at Mount Holyoke, defines as “those who davened or prayed right. Girls who good ga davened did well. They marry doctors and go to Bermuda for Memorial Day weekends. These girls are also doctors but they only work part-time because of their three musically inclined children, and weekly brownstone restorations.” It is akin to “a ‘did well’ list published annually, in New York, Winnetka, and Beverly Hills, and distributed on High Holy Days. …”¹³ Upward mobility and a securely middle-class status have become so central to the ethos of American Jewry that even a far less savvy undergraduate than Holly cannot fail to notice.

Of course anti-Semitism has not entirely evaporated; when the uncommon women play conjugal games with one another, Samantha Stewart realizes that she cannot “marry” Holly because back home “there would be a problem at the club.” But secularism has narrowed the gap between Jew and gentile. Holly would never concur with an earlier Jew, a Venetian who declines an invitation to dine with Bassanio: “I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you … but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you” (The Merchant of Venice 1.3). Secularism is also powered by the sexual revolution. Filling a diaphragm with Orthocreme, Holly announces: “Now … whenever I see a boy with a yarmulke, I think he has a diaphragm on his head. I shouldn't have said that. I'll be struck down by a burning bush.”¹⁴

Wanting to connect (by telephone) with Dr. Mark Silverstein, whom she had met at the Fogg Museum the previous summer, Holly reveals through her monologue her insecurity, her smarts, her uncertainties, her taste in culture, and her yearning for both interdependence and intimacy, as well as her need to forge her own future. In 1978, six years after graduating, Holly is unmarried, her life in limbo. “I haven't made any specific choices,” she tells her college friends. “My parents used to call me three times a week at seven A.M. to ask me, ‘Are you thin, are you married to a root-canal man, are you a root-canal man?’ And I'd hang up and wonder how much longer I was going to be in ‘transition.’” She may still be unattached because of the historical factors beyond her control. To find the right (Jewish) man has become dicey. Jet planes had already made Miami no harder to visit than the Catskills, narrowing the distinctive sites for dating and mating, as Kutsher's came to be considered a last resort.¹⁵ Reluctant to compromise, Holly may have to remain single. Refusing to compromise, her creator forfeited a chance to bring Uncommon Women and Others to Broadway. One producer considered the play “too wistful” and proposed a revised ending: “When everyone asks Holly, ‘What's new with you?’ she should pull out a diamond ring and say, ‘Guess what? I'm going to marry Dr. Mark Silverstein.’” The playwright herself thought: “Well, she'd have to have a lobotomy, and I'd have to have a lobotomy too.”¹⁶

The focus of Wasserstein's next play is the third of the inalienable rights that Jefferson had enumerated: the pursuit of happiness. Its possible incompatibility with Jewish continuity is a variation on the major theme of Isn't It Romantic—the only one of Wasserstein's four major plays in which parents appear. Janie Blumberg knows she can please them by making them grandparents. But she cannot tell them, “Here are your naches”—at least not yet. How Simon Blumberg and especially his wife scheme to kvell and seek to ensure bliss for (and through) the children (especially the daughter, who has moved from Brookline to Manhattan) gives their relationship the tone of an adversary proceeding, a family feud l'dor vador (from generation to generation). Tasha Blumberg advises Janie to “always look nice when you throw out the garbage: you never know who you might meet,”¹⁷ and serenades her with a prenuptial “Sunrise, Sunset” (from Fiddler on the Roof). But on the common ground of cultural pluralism and status seeking, religion is no barrier to friendship or romance. Contemporary mores even encourage a certain philo-Semitism, as when Janie's friend Harriet (Hattie) Cornwall studies the Oxford Companion to Jewish Life and her mother, Lillian, tells Tasha that both of them “deserve a little naches.” Intermarriage has ceased to be a fear and has become a fact. (Guess who's coming to the seder?) The Blumbergs' son, Ben, has married a Nebraskan named Chris (whom the parents call “Christ”). Cynthia Peterson, known to the audience only as a voice (Meryl Streep's in the Broadway production) on Janie's answering machine, feels so lonely that she wonders—intertextually—whether she “should have married Mark Silverstein in college.”¹⁸

The task of reconciling the ideal of female independence with a yearning for intimacy and maternity is borne by the twenty-eight-year-old protagonist. Here is how Janie ponders her options: “I resent having to pay the phone bill, be nice to the super, find meaningful work, fall in love, get hurt. … [But] I could marry the pervert who's staring at us. No. That's not a solution. I could always move back to Brookline. Get another master's in something useful like Women's Pottery. Do a little freelance writing. Oh, God, it's exhausting.” One option is Dr. (again!) Marty Sterline, né Murray Schlimovitz, a kidney specialist with a love of Jewish cuisine. His restaurateur father has prospered in part by hustling popovers in television commercials. The “toastmaster general for the United Jewish Appeal,” Sterling père risks losing that status because the commercials promote free shrimp at the salad bar. Although such lapses and foibles make the Jewish community a tempting target for satire, the playwright does not mock the comfort that Marty himself derives from ahavat yisrael, or solidarity with the Jewish people. “I worked on a kibbutz the second time I dropped out of medical school,” he tells Janie. “Israel's very important to me. In fact, I have to decide next month if I want to open my practice here in New York or in Tel Aviv.” He worries about assimilation (of which the indices are “intermarriage, Ivy League colleges, the New York Review of Books”); and he believes “Jewish families should have at least three children.”¹⁹

But does Janie want what Marty offers? Does she love him? He is nice enough to be appealing. But his very attractiveness also seems to foreclose the future, to narrow her options, to block her freedom of choice. As with some of the uncommon graduating seniors, Janie sees tracking as a threat to be avoided, a conventionally bourgeois life as something to be dreaded. “He's decided to open his practice here next month,” she tells Hattie, “and he's invited me to his parents' house for Chanukah. … [Maybe] I'll marry Marty. Whatever happened to Janie Blumberg? She did so well; she married Marty the doctor. They're giving away popovers in Paramus.” Marty upholds traditional ways, preferring to live in the parts of Brooklyn “where people have real values. My father never sees those people anymore, the alta kakas in Brooklyn. … I miss them. … My father thought my brother was crazy when he named his son Shlomo. … And my father will think I'm crazy when we move to Brooklyn.” Janie, who admires the true grit of Israelis, is not sure about leaving Manhattan but characteristically deflects (or defers) conflict with a quip: “I like the alta kakas in Brooklyn too. I always thought Herman Wouk should write a novel, Young Kafka. I don't know.”²⁰

She still resists facing a destiny that is signed, sealed, and delivered, the sort of finality that can be predicted in the headline with which the Sunday Times will certify their wedding: “Daughter of Pioneer in Interpretive Dance Marries Popover Boy.” That destiny entails too many expectations to fulfill; and, using a joke to escape a yoke, she telephones her mother: “This morning I got married, lost twenty pounds, and became a lawyer.” Yet the dramatist plays fair and allows Marty the dignity of decent ambitions. He too wants “a home, a family, something my father had so easily and I can't seem to get started on.” He has also “wanted something special [as well]. Just a little. Maybe not as special as you turned out to be, but just a little. Janie, I don't want to marry anyone like my sister-in-law.” Though Janie can imagine a wedding at the Plaza Hotel, where “baby Shlomo could carry the ring in one of my father's gold-seal envelopes,” it wouldn't be right. As for her own “settling down,” “there's nothing wrong with that life, but it just isn't mine right now.”²¹

A sympathetic and sprightly romantic comedy about young people just starting out in Manhattan, combined with the daughter's mother very much on the scene and a possibly amorous foreigner, sounds a little like Barefoot in the Park (1963). Isn't It Romantic is indeed indebted to Neil Simon. Attorney Paul Bratter's announcement that he had won his first case, but that—because the court awarded his client only six cents—his law firm would henceforth give him “all the cases that come in for a dime or under,” is akin to Janie's pride in getting to write the letter B on Sesame Street: “If they like this, they'll hire me full-time. In charge of consonants.” The troubling part of Wasserstein's dialogue is not that it is unamusing but that it is, which is how Janie ends a confrontation with presumably feminist Harriet about the importance of autonomy, even if it means the pursuit of loneliness (“I'm not going to turn someone into the answer for me”). Janie and her creator deflate rising dramatic tension into the denouement of self-deprecating humor to ward off an invasion of privacy. Humor for the playwright herself has “always been just a way to get by,” she has confessed, “a way to be likable yet to remain removed.”²² After a while, however, serious audiences have the right to expect more and harsher truths to be uncovered.

Even Neil Simon slowed down the pace of his wit and revealed unsuspected depths of pathos and loss in his autobiographical trilogy of the 1980s (Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues, and Broadway Bound). Wasserstein's most recent play lightly mocks such artistic growth when Geoffrey Duncan, the British director, boasts to Pfeni Rosensweig: “If not for me, you'd still think that Uncle Vanya was a Neil Simon play about his pathetic uncle in the Bronx.”²³ Witticisms are ultimately no substitute for wisdom; they are no more than a local anesthetic, as Wasserstein herself is the first to acknowledge. “Although I am proud of the last scene in Isn't It Romantic” and its declaration of independence from parents and men, she told an interviewer that “the play doesn't deal with the pain of that subject. The real reason for comedy is to hide the pain. It is a way to cope with it.” The perky wit of the protagonist “gives her the ability to distance herself from situations,”²⁴ a locale that is the opposite of the vortex of the tragic hero. But to keep creating such characters is to remain with the junior varsity.

A considerable segment of Wasserstein's audience nevertheless expects her to entertain and implicitly keeps issuing gag orders, imperatives that ought to be resisted for the sake of her own growth as an artist. She did become more serious in her next and most ambitious work, The Heidi Chronicles, without forsaking her flair for snap-crackle-and-pop dialogue and satiric observation. The quarter of a century that the play spans ends in desolation, with the loss of friends, the stretching of bonds to the breaking point, and the plague of AIDS raging outside. Above all the play is a chronicle of abandonment. Sisterhood is powerful—but not enough to resist infection by the culture of narcissism—and the conclusion that the plucky and sensitive protagonist draws from this failure is justly famous: “I feel stranded. And I thought the whole point was that we wouldn't feel stranded. I thought the point was that we were all in this together.”²⁵ To be sure, Heidi Holland would not have concurred with the 1853 claim of Henry James, Sr., that “the ‘Woman's Movement,’ as it is called, does not … presage any directly valuable results,” nor with his reasons (since the second sex is the male's “inferior in passion, his inferior in intellect and his inferior in physical strength”).²⁶ But Heidi is at least vaguely aware that no meaningful substitute has been found for the cohesiveness of earlier generations of families, and until she adopts the infant Judy, her isolation may reflect the almost 25 percent of U.S. households now consisting of one person (up from only 8 percent in 1940).²⁷

Nuclear families remain standard, however. They persist, get reconstituted and—when given up for dead—play possum. Even the extended family has become reconstituted in a way with the invention of joint custody, “in which two formerly married people share in raising their children. Your basic extended family today,” Delia Ephron adds, “includes your ex-husband or -wife, your ex's new mate, your new mate, possibly your new mate's ex, and any new mate that your new mate's ex has acquired. It consists entirely of people who are not related by blood, many of whom can't stand each other.”²⁸ Families divide too, and other loyalties are articulated. The first edition of Betty Friedan's classic was dedicated to her husband “and to our children—Daniel, Jonathan, and Emily.” After a divorce, a new 1974 edition of The Feminine Mystique was dedicated to “all the new women, and the new men.” Some of those men were indeed new: by 1986 even Superman was becoming “more vulnerable” and “more open about his feelings,” according to a vice president of DC Comics.²⁹ But a gendered community like the company of women envisioned in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915) is an unrealized utopia. Nor does Heidi have the option of recreating the “loveless intimacy” of the Brownsville neighborhood that in 1951 Alfred Kazin could at least summon from his memory: “We had always to be together: believers and nonbelievers, we were a people; I was of that people. … We had all of us lived together so long that we would not have known how to separate even if we had wanted to. The most terrible word was aleyn, alone.”³⁰ He could still recall the ethics of the fathers, still savor the cooking of the mothers. But “Brunzvil” had its obvious limitations, only one of which was its diminution of women.

The corrective that feminism was designed to represent is scrutinized in The Heidi Chronicles, which shows how that ideology can clash with the feminine mystique. Such tension had earlier surfaced in Uncommon Women and Others. “I suppose this isn't a very impressive sentiment,” Muffet Di Nicola asserts shortly before her graduation, “but I would really like to meet my prince. Even a few princes. And I wouldn't give up being a person. I'd still remember all the Art History dates. I just don't know why suddenly I'm supposed to know what I want to do.” In The Heidi Chronicles Scoop Rosenbaum is no prince. Having played lacrosse at Exeter before entering Princeton, he is a cad and an attorney, a trendy leftish journalist in the 1960s, a trendy publisher of the fluffy Boomer in the 1980s, a Jew and “a charismatic creep” with no redeeming value. Heidi is irresistibly drawn to him. As in Wasserstein's earlier plays, the female protagonist anticipates a future that she needs to elude. At thirty-five, Scoop predicts, Heidi will be “picking your daughter up from Ethical Culture School to escort her to cello class before dinner with Dad, the noted psychiatrist and Miró poster collector.”³¹ Evasive action will prove successful; her daughter will presumably be raised without Dad.

Although praiseworthy as Wasserstein's most important critique of the effects and limitations of feminism, The Heidi Chronicles is the least illuminating on the topic of the Jewish condition in the United States—largely because the central character is almost certainly not Jewish. (Wasserstein spurned an offer to make the Hollywood film version a vehicle for Goldie Hawn, who is Jewish, but hardly stereotypically so.³²) When Scoop weds Lisa Friedlander of Memphis, he conjectures that his friend Heidi and her friend Dr. Peter Patrone are romantically involved: “Makes sense. Lisa marries a nice Jewish lawyer, Heidi marries a warm Italian pediatrician. It's all interchangeable, isn't it?” Yet Scoop's preference for Lisa over Heidi is not, he insists, because “she's Jewish” but because, Heidi counters, “she's blandish.” Peter's homosexuality torpedoes not only Scoop's speculation, however; the model future that (Jewish) parental expectation has formed is also made risible. Told that Peter is living with an anesthesiologist and gardens with him during the summers in Bucks County, Scoop replies: “A handsome doctor and a country house. Peter's living my mother's dream come true!”³³

The centrality of Jewish identity to her fourth play, however, comes out when the bisexual Geoffrey Duncan tells Pfeni Rosensweig: “You really don't understand what it is to have absolutely no idea who you are!”³⁴ An identity crisis can be tiring, but as a theme in American Jewish drama, identity was not yet tiresome. In the plays of Elmer Rice or Sidney Kingsley or Lillian Hellman, it rarely if ever came up. Wasserstein makes the faulty transmission of Yiddishkeit central, however, while hugging the shore of gender that she finds most congenial. The five uncommon women have been reduced to three and have become middle-aged as well. Two of them are single, but all are Jewish. By making them not just a trio of white chicks sittin' around talkin' but actual sisters, the playwright has injected Anton Chekhov into the Jewish family constellation.

If Wasserstein's previous work consisted mostly of episodes, of sketches woven together as much by chronological order as by action, with her fourth play emerged the formal satisfactions of structure, honoring the “unities of time, place, and action.”³⁵ Perhaps as directly from Chekhov as from any other influence, Wasserstein learned to mix detachment with sympathy, objectification with wry feeling. The distinction between the cosmic and the comic is, after all, a matter of spacing—and, at least on stage, of pacing. (Or consider the virtuosity of film star Amy Irving, who had played Masha in The Three Sisters in Williamstown in 1987, and then played Heidi Holland in Los Angeles three year later.) In The Sisters Rosensweig the author's nimble wit is intact; her particular version of Moscow does not believe in tears. One might even be tempted to report that in this work Chekhov meets Neil Simon—except that they had already been formally introduced: Simon had already paid homage on Broadway to the Russian master in The Good Doctor in (1973), and Chekhov himself was no slouch in extracting mellow laughter from the stupendous folly of human behavior. (If the reputation that his plays enjoy is of unsparing gloom, the performances and the translations may be accountable.³⁶) The three American Jewish sisters may not pine away and suffer unbearably from ennui. Indeed, from Newton to Nepal, their lives throb with excitement. But the sisters are not exactly fulfilled either, and feelings of disappointment and frustration are among the promises that the structure of human existence never fails to keep. Moscow is not mecca (and Mecca certainly is not), but disenchantment and misplaced dreams are familiar to the sisters Rosensweig.

They are, in the playwright's categorization, “a practicing Jew, a wandering Jew, and a self-loathing Jew.”³⁷ They are also a gloss on the poet Randall Jarrell's line: “The ways we miss our lives are life.”³⁸ In the closing scene of the play, seventeen-year-old Tess Goode asks Sara: “Mother, if I've never really been Jewish, and I'm not actually American anymore, and I'm not English or European, then who am I?” It is a question that goes beyond the special status of the expatriate adolescent, that taps into the peculiar history of the modern Jew—the “rootless cosmopolitan,” the extraterritorial, “the wandering Jew” (as Pfeni calls herself).³⁹ Identity can be altered in a nation that spawned such protean Midwesterners as Jay Gatsby, Bob Dylan, Malcolm X, and Judy Chicago; by bestowing new patronymics upon themselves, they tested the possibilities of self-invention. But Jewish identity itself is too impalpable and too demanding to be easily transmitted, and the institutions that have been built to foster and sustain it The Sisters Rosensweig treats ambivalently, as objects of respect as well as of satire. Merv Kant, for example, has been monitoring Eastern European anti-Semitism on behalf of the American Jewish Congress; his allegiances are taken seriously. At least they are not undercut by any of the other characters. But what should audiences make of Gorgeous Teitelbaum? Endowed with the silliest given name, she matches a stereotype so completely that even Merv falls for it: “So you're the sister who did everything right. You married the attorney, you had the children, you moved to the suburbs.”⁴⁰ Yet she is not to be scorned: members of synagogues like Beth El—and its organizations like the Sisterhood—have kept Judaism alive for yet another generation.

That responsibility is hardly shared by thoroughly modern Sara, who wonders: why light Sabbath candles when there is electricity? Disdaining the Fourth Commandment (“Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy”), she orders Pfeni to “blow out the god-damned candle” that Gorgeous has lit and sanctified with the Hebrew blessing.⁴¹ Yet Sara offers no substitute, no alternative gesture that might convey the beauty of Judaism to her own daughter. The international banker whose birthday has drawn the sisters from American and from Asia is deracinated. In London she herself may have rubbed against some genteel bigotry, embodied in Nicholas Pym. Jews in Britain, as the South African writer Dan Jacobson once put it, felt as though a room in the house had been given to them; but they were treated like boarders rather than members of the family.⁴² Sara is even more adrift. She is alienated from her country, her family, and her faith: “I'm an old and bitter woman.” Though she has twice appeared on the cover of Fortune, “I'm a cold, bitter woman who's turned her back on her family, her religion, and her country! And I held so much in. … Isn't that the way the old assimilated story goes?”⁴³ The play offers no clues, however, to account for the psychic sources of such utter self-denial.⁴⁴ Her sensibility is hardly exceptional. But for well over a generation, American society was in some ways moving in the opposite direction—exalting ethnic diversity and the rediscovery of roots, and harboring the most pious Christians (other than the Irish) in the Western World.

Sara has propelled herself furiously away from the parochialism of the Jews and the rituals of their faith. Twice divorced and homeless, she cannot return home. Her ties to her people are very tenuous. But they are not completely forfeited. Significantly, they reach only backwards into the past, as when Sara and Merv discover common ground—the spa resort named Ciechocinek, “the Palm Beach of Poland.” There she had gone to provide financial expertise; there his own grandparents had vacationed. And now, “fifty years after the lucky few had escaped with false passports, Esther Malchah's granddaughter Sara was deciding how to put bread on the tables of those who had so blithely driven them all away.”⁴⁵ (Aharon Appelfeld's 1980 allegory of doomed, assimilated Middle European Jews, Badenheim 1939, has them coming to a resort town.) Sandra Meyer, to whom the play is dedicated, told an interviewer: “That Polish resort town in The Sisters Rosensweig is really where my grandparents had their villa, with tennis courts and their own pastry chef. They were very sophisticated and had a lot of money.” Lola Wasserstein's father—and Wendy's grandfather—had escaped from Poland. While serving as a high school principal in Paterson, New Jersey, Simon Schleifer wrote some Yiddish plays. But it would be both reductive and idle to speculate that the sisters Rosensweig represent the playwright herself in triplicate, or that she has created Pfeni as a surrogate, though she is the youngest of the three sisters and the only writer among them. That is also true of Wendy Wasserstein. But the peripatetic Pfeni is an invention.⁴⁶

With her charming but gentile companion, she is also unaffiliated with institutions that might keep her (or indeed her generation) from being terminal Jews. When Geoffrey, flushed with excitement, imagines their future kids as so dynamic “they'll be running Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer before age seven,” Pfeni asks: “But will they be Jewish children?” Geoffrey rebuts with an eccentric case for remaining within the fold: “They'll have to be if they're going to run M.G.M.” Forty-year-old Pfeni's biological clock is ticking away like Captain Hook's crocodile (the playwright herself was named for Peter Pan's Wendy), but the British theater director is probably not going to succeed as a “closet heterosexual.”⁴⁷

Pfenie is an advocacy journalist, endowed with a passion for social justice, a champion of the rights of women in Tajikistan. Yet she realizes that such concerns may preempt other forms of self-expression: “Somewhere I need the hardship of the Afghan women and the Kurdish suffering to fill up my life for me.”⁴⁸ Devoid of any interest in the welfare of her own people, Pfeni is a paler version of the Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, who wrote to a fellow Jew from a prison cell in 1917: “What do you want with the special Jewish sorrows? To me, the poor victims of rubber plantations of Putumayo, [and] the negroes in Africa … in the Kalahari desert … are equally near. … I have no special corner in my heart for the ghetto: I feel at home in the whole world.”⁴⁹ Such generous feelings the world did not reciprocate. Having ignored a wake-up call like the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, Luxemburg would be murdered by right-wing thugs in 1919, and could scarcely have foreseen that, little more than two decades later, genocidal killers would not spare her own Jewish community of Zamosc.⁵⁰ In Pfeni's capacity to empathize with other groups (but not with her fellow Jews), she is a descendant of Rosa Luxemburg.

Compared to Sara and Pfeni, the defense can therefore make out a pretty good case for Gorgeous. It is not an airtight case: she is flaky, garrulous, and materialistic. Nor are her ambitions noble: The Dr. Gorgeous Show might expand from a radio call-in into a cable-TV talk show (“talking has always come easily to me”). Challenged to reveal the provenance of that professional prefix of “Dr.,” she replies with another question: “You've heard of Dr. Pepper?” With her “funsy” vocabulary, Filene's shopping bag, and thrill at wearing a Chanel suit instead of a knockoff, she does invite ridicule—as well as the urge to shut her up with a “Say goodnight, Gracie.” But Gorgeous does get briefly beneath her shallowness, even if—rather implausibly—she voices the Chekhovian hope “that each of us can say at some point that we had a moment of pure, unadulterated happiness! Do you think that's possible, Sara?” Gorgeous also gets to deliver one of the play's very few searing lines: “How did our nice Jewish mother do such a lousy job on us?”⁵¹ None of the Rosensweigs has an answer or a comeback, nor is it obvious that their mother did muck up their lives. And to whom, in any case, should Rita Rosensweig be compared? To Tennessee Williams' Amanda Wingfield or Eugene O'Neill's Mary Tyrone or, for that matter, Mother Courage?

More than an ethnic caricature, less than a full-scale figure of pathos, Gorgeous exemplifies and complicates Wasserstein's difficulty in finding the right tone for “my most serious work.” Exploring such phenomena as “identity, self-loathing, and possibility for intimacy and love when it seems no longer possible or, sadder yet, no longer necessary,” she and her director were startled when the first preview audience soon became “convulsed with laughter.”⁵² Yet she is not the first Jewish writer to have trouble knowing which characters are cockamamie and which are not, what comes across as funny and what does not, what tastes as sweet as haroset or as bitter as maror. When Kafka read aloud to a few friends the first chapter of The Trial, they laughed; and the presumably mordant author himself “laughed so much,” his first biographer reports, “there were moments when he couldn't read any further.”⁵³ While writing Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller claimed that he “laughed more … than I have ever done, when alone, in my life.” When he read one scene to his (first) wife, she wept; the playwright considered it “hilarious.”⁵⁴ Joseph Heller professed to have been unaware that “Catch-22 was a funny book until I heard someone laugh while reading it.”⁵⁵ Such short-circuited artistic aims may stem from the condition of post-Emancipation Jewry in the Diaspora, which has been so fraught with uncertainty and absurdity. “A kingdom of priests and a holy people” had to make room for the sisters' father, Maury Rosensweig (a manufacturer of “Kiddie Togs”), and for a leader in the field of “synthetic animal protective covering” like Mervyn Kant. Marginality has encouraged the exercise of irony and a sense of the ridiculous as well as anguish, and wit became, like the violin, mostly a Jewish instrument. Satire was a way of getting even, as well as a protective device.

Wasserstein's flair for wisecracks is so dazzling that it has raised doubts about her significance for the American theater. “I had hoped, after The Heidi Chronicles, that my very gifted former student was shaking her witticism habit,” Robert Brustein wrote. “The Sisters Rosensweig has a lot of charm, but it is a regression. … By its own internal measure, which is to be likable, The Sisters Rosensweig is a success. People will be entertained and will leave the theatre feeling warm and wise, which are the requisites of a commercial hit.”⁵⁶ Yet an earlier Jewish female playwright like Lillian Hellman had also produced Broadway hits and has elicited considerably more scholarly attention and critical accolades. The U.S. Geological Survey even named a crater on Venus for her. What Hellman lacked in the power to amuse she compensated for with political commitment, of which Wasserstein seems bereft.⁵⁷ (In the spring of 1995, however, she did accompany Joanne Woodward and Melanie Griffith on a Literary Network-sponsored lobbying visit to Capitol Hill. In an effort to save the National Endowment for the Arts, they met with dozens of legislators.⁵⁸ Perhaps the charm and ebullience that Wasserstein's plays exude make them seem frivolous; too much brio can spike critical interest. She has declined to set herself up as a maven in a heartless world. Because her deftness at comedy dwarfs her other gifts, scholars are compelled to seat her below the salt, next to others who entertain more than they enlighten.

Here a useful comparison might be with David Mamet, who paid his own tribute to Chekhov with a version of Uncle Vanya (1989) and whose high-testosterone dramas often depict Jews and other shell-shocked veterans of the wars between the sexes. (He is undoubtedly the only dues-paying member of both the Dramatists Guild and the United Steelworkers of America.) Though Mamet has also recently attempted to record the costs that assimilation has imposed, his style is, of course, quite different from Wasserstein's. Staccato and elliptical, his dialogue can be obscene enough to make even the Wife of Bath blush. The usually male characters have trouble stating precisely what they mean—and these corrupt, cynical low-lifes are mean. By contrast, Wasserstein's mostly female characters tend to be articulate, brilliant, classy, vulnerable, gentle and genteel,⁵⁹ as they try to approximate the ideal of “gracious living” that her play shows Mount Holyoke to have fostered. Her characters are warm, while Mamet's perspective—and language—are scalding. In contrast to the savagery that he exposes beneath the veneer of civilized life, Wasserstein portrays “very nice girls” who, according to Tasha Blumberg, “deserve a little naches.”⁶⁰ What is missing in Wasserstein's work, and keeps it too close to merely clever entertainment, is menace—the spooky, subterranean impulses that threaten to tear apart the skein of everyday existence. Sophisticated audiences need to ruminate over more than lively repartee, tossed back and forth by characters fearful of the truth-telling that comes from introspection and confrontation. Serious audiences need to hear more often a little night music.

To Wasserstein's four major plays to date, attention must nevertheless be paid. She cannot be expected to rip apart the barbarism of selling Chicago real estate (or the ambiguities of leveraged buyouts), but she has drawn astutely on what she does know. Indeed, the distantly autobiographical aspects of her work constitute its strength and give its details verisimilitude: she knows that Gorgeous would not buy a gift for her sister at Filene's Basement.⁶¹ Wasserstein knows how her characters behave and—since repartee enables them to skirt the truth—how her characters talk. (Contrast the guffaws that should punctuate a reading of Herman Wouk's use of a hokum hillbilly accent in Youngblood Hawke: “Ah should be hung fo' mah cramm against the English language in rahtin' that book. … An can raht better than that. Ah'm rahtin' betta raht now.”⁶²) Wasserstein's satiric powers have been cultivated enough to fulfill the promise that Rita Altabel makes in Uncommon Women: “When we're forty, we'll be incredible.”⁶³ And however inadvertently, her plays also constitute an entree into the subculture of American Jewry. Barely a teenager when Thomas B. Morgan's reverberant article, “The Vanishing American Jew” (1964), was published in Look Magazine, she has lived through a period of even more accelerating assimilation.⁶⁴ The signs are unmistakable: low birth rates, ever-higher intermarriage rates, declining affiliations with institutions that have served Diaspora communities for centuries. It is not easy to be sanguine about a viable future for this most ancient and adaptable of peoples. Yet the American Jew has not vanished (though Look Magazine itself did), and his—and her—fate can be traced in the dramaturgy of Wendy Wasserstein.

Notes

1. Quoted in Leslie Bennetts, “An Uncommon Dramatist Prepares Her New Work,” New York Times, 24 May 1981, 2.5.

2. Quoted in Iska Alter, “Wendy Wasserstein (1950-),” in Jewish American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical and Critical Sourcebook, ed. Ann R. Shapiro et al. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994), 449; Wendy Wasserstein, “My Mother, Then and NOW,” in her Bachelor Girls (New York: Knopf, 1990), 15-22.

3. Wasserstein, “Jean Harlow's Wedding Night,” in Bachelor Girls, 184; “Wendy Wasserstein,” in Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights, ed. Kathleen Betsko and Rachel Koenig (New York: William Morrow, 1987), 425, 429.

4. Anita Gates, “Today Most Are in Their 40's, and Pretty Amazing,” New York Times, 16 October 1994, 2.5; Nancy Backes, “Wasserstein, Wendy,” in Notable Women in the American Theatre: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Alice M. Robinson, Vera Mowry Roberts, and Milly S. Barranger (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1989), 902.

5. Jonathan D. Sarna, Jacksonian Jew: The Two Worlds of Mordecai Noah (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981), 6-7, 12, 47-50.

6. Stephen J. Whitfield, “Stages of Capitalism: The Business of American Jewish Dramatists,” Jewish History 8, nos. 1-2 (1994): 312, 315, 316-18; Wasserstein, “Big Brother,” in Bachelor Girls, 83-84.

7. Quoted in Bennetts, “An Uncommon Dramatist,” 1.

8. Wendy Wasserstein, The Sisters Rosensweig (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1993), 27.

9. Wendy Wasserstein, Isn't It Romantic, in The Heidi Chronicles and Other Plays (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 149-50.

10. Alter, “Wendy Wasserstein,” 449.

11. Milton Himmelfarb, The Jews of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 135.

12. Wasserstein, Sisters Rosensweig, 53, 74.

13. Wasserstein, Uncommon Women and Others, in Heidi Chronicles and Other Plays, 62.

14. Ibid., 33, 39.

15. Ibid., 61-63, 71; William Novak, “Are Good Jewish Men a Vanishing Breed”, in Jewish Possibilities: The Best of Moment Magazine, ed. Leonard Fein (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1987), 60-66; Edward S. Shapiro, A Time for Healing: American Jewry since World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 139-43.

16. Quoted in “Wendy Wasserstein,” Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights, 426.

17. Wasserstein, Heidi Chronicles and Other Plays, 85, 148.

18. Ibid., 143, 152.

19. Ibid., 82, 97.

20. Ibid., 103-4, 110.

21. Ibid., 120, 124, 138-39, 148.

22. Neil Simon, Barefoot in the Park, in The Comedy of Neil Simon (New York: Equinox, 1973), 147; Wasserstein, Heidi Chronicles and Other Plays, 143-45, and “Jean Harlow's Wedding Night,” in Bachelor Girls, 184.

23. Wasserstein, Sisters Rosensweig, 17.

24. Quoted in Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights, 420, 425.

25. Wasserstein, The Heidi Chronicles, in Heidi Chronicles and Other Plays, 232.

26. Quoted in Alfred Habegger, The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr. (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994), 339-40.

27. Robert Wright, “The Evolution of Despair,” Time Magazine, 28 August 1995, 53.

28. Delia Ephron, Funny Sauce (New York: Viking, 1986), ix.

29. “But Can He Cook?” New York Times, 15 June 1986, 4.9.

30. Alfred Kazin, A Walker in the City (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 44, 60.

31. Wasserstein, Heidi Chronicles and Other Plays, 25, 170, 181, 174.

32. Carolyn Clay, “The Wendy Chronicles,” Boston Phoenix, 1 March 1991, 3.11.

33. Wasserstein, Heidi Chronicles and Other Plays, 196, 202, 245.

34. Wasserstein, Sisters Rosensweig, 88.

35. Wasserstein, Preface to ibid., ix.

36. John Bush Jones, “‘You Are What You Are’: Jewish Identity in Recent American Drama,” syllabus of Brandeis University National Women's Committee (Waltham, Mass. [1994]), 41-42.

37. Quoted in “Wasserstein's World,” Reform Judaism 21 (Summer 1993): 45.

38. Randall Jarrell, “A Girl in a Library” (1951), in The Complete Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 18.

39. Wasserstein, Sisters Rosensweig, 103, 106.

40. Wasserstein, Sisters Rosensweig, 30.

41. Ibid., 12, 36-38.

42. Cited in Calvin Trillin, “Drawing the Line,” New Yorker, 12 December 1994, 56.

43. Wasserstein, Sisters Rosensweig, 81.

44. Jones, “‘You Are What You Are,’” 44.

45. Wasserstein, Sisters Rosensweig, 79-80; see Howard Kissel, “The Banker, the Writer, and the Yenta,” Reform Judaism 21 (Summer 1993): 44-45.

46. Phoebe Hoban, “The Family Wasserstein,” New York, 4 January 1993, 35; Judith Miller, “The Secret Wendy Wasserstein,” New York Times, 18 October 1992, 2.8.

47. Backes, “Wasserstein, Wendy,” 901; Wasserstein, Sisters Rosensweig, 65, 68.

48. Wasserstein, Sisters Rosensweig, 77.

49. Quoted in J. L. Talmon, The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), 217.

50. Ibid.

51. Wasserstein, Sisters Rosensweig, 30, 31, 94, 96.

52. Ibid., ix, x.

53. Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography (New York: Schocken, 1963), 50, 76-77, 133, 178.

54. Arthur Miller, “The ‘Salesman’ Has a Birthday” (1950), in Death of a Salesman, ed. Gerald Weales (New York: Viking, 1967), 148.

55. “Playboy Interview: Joseph Heller,” Playboy 20 (June 1975): 73.

56. Robert Brustein, Dumbocracy in America: Studies in the Theatre of Guilt, 1987-1994 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1994), 162.

57. David Richards, “Wendy Wasserstein's School of Life,” New York Times, 1 November 1992, 2.5.

58. “LitNet's Advocacy Highlights,” Literary Network News, August 1995, 2.

59. Backes, “Wasserstein, Wendy,” 903.

60. Wasserstein, Heidi Chronicles and Other Plays, 119.

61. Joan Kron, “All-Consuming Art,” New York Times, 6 December 1992, 2.12.

62. Herman Wouk, Youngblood Hawke (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962), 203, 270.

63. Wasserstein, Heidi Chronicles and Other Plays, 12.

64. Thomas B. Morgan, “The Vanishing American Jew,” Look 28 (5 May 1964): 42-46.