[Munk is an American editor and critic. Below, she likens Wasserstein's revised version of Isn't It Romantic to popular television drama, suggesting that the play's characterizations are weak and its plot lacks real dramatic conflict, but adds that the acting in Isn't It Romantic is excellent.]

Peculiar as it may seem, live theater for the upper middle class is tending more and more to become a replica of the TV drama that same class creates to pacify the rest of us: punchy little scenes moving from living room to bedroom to office; neat little characterizations relying heavily on racial and cultural type, psychologized plots about mild generational conflict and not too passionate romance, powdered saccharine slowly sifting over everything at the end, and never a glimmer of the world outside.

TV writers know that their prime function is to fill time between one commercial and the next; what Wendy Wasserstein—who seems talented, serious, and surely perhaps alas, not cynical—thinks she's doing is to entertain us very, very lightly with the theme of women's self-determination. The commercials are there, however, selling upper middle-class reconciliation.

In Isn't It Romantic Janie, a would-be writer, tries to declare some independence from her mother, Tasha (father is marginally in tow), by getting her own apartment, taking a part-time job writing for Sesame Street, and refusing to move in with the young doctor she loves. Janie's story is paralleled by her friend Harriet, who rebels against her super-executive mother, Lillian, by getting married. Tasha wants Janie to settle down with a "nice" (meaning wealthy) man, so she refuses; Lillian wants Harriet to concentrate on work (meaning corporate success), so she doesn't. Both mothers take their daughters' rebellions with grace, after a brief moment's grousing; so we have a happy ending on the status quo, with opening positions merely reversed.

The parallels and oppositions, not to mention much of the humor, are shaped by one fact alone: Janie's Jewish, Harriet's WASP. So of course Janie is warm, disorganized, and has fat thighs, and Harriet is tall, thin, and put together, while Tasha is vulgar, meddlesome, and lovable, and Lillian is elegant, straightforward, and cool. Because everyone's rich, however, the entire gamut of Jewish-intellectual-radical stereotypes is left out. And because this is a TV play at heart, both Judaism and Protestantism are stripped of all religious and ethical meanings. Believe me, they're missed.

The first act sets the story up in a series of jokes; a few are wonderfully wicked about bourgeois feminism (Janie gets a rejection message on her phone machine: "Our readers feel you haven't experienced enough woman's pain to stimulate our market"), others are eccentrically and delightfully local (like the one about the Four Brothers restaurants), and most of the rest, as mentioned, are about Jewishness. The only portrait unblunted by affection, however, is the figure of Paul Stuart, Harriet's married lover, who—like Lillian and Harriet herself, I guess it's a Protestant trait—keeps saying, "Everything in life's a negotiation," and acting unbelievably, hilariously swinish. The others, however exaggerated, are too nice for satire, too human for farce, too thin for comedy.

The second act gets more and more sentimental and conciliatory, as if Wasserstein had "satire is what closes on Saturday" engraved on her heart, and "politics is what closes on Friday" engraved on her brain. Banal dialogues—"I want it all," "You have to set priorities"—increasingly edge up on the funny parts, emotions emerge palely from the mouths of cartoons, and the fact that there's nothing there becomes the only notable presence.

Too bad, because the cast is terrific. Cristine Rose's Janie is earnest, rowdy, and—horrid overused word—vulnerable; I'd believe in her as a writer, if she'd been given the chance to play one. Lisa Banes, more mannered, has a less believable transition to make, but manages. Betty Comden is so spiffy as mother Tasha that the point of Janie's rebellion almost disappears—it's clear she'll never lose her mother's love, so what's the danger? And Jo Henderson takes a part that might be a comic version of Marlene in Top Girls and makes it so sympathetic, though rational, that Harriet's rebellion also loses point. Chip Zien exactly captures the simultaneous niceness and suffocating patronizing of Janie's lover ("The Jewish family should always have three children"). But Jerry Lanning's Paul, boorish, twitchy, arrogant, and blissfully unaware, gets the acting honors, perhaps because he's the one character Wasserstein felt no compunction about.