Wendy Wasserstein's 1977 comedy Uncommon Women and Others mirrors [Clare] Boothe's [1937 comedy The Women] in its all-female world and picaresque plot; and it borrows the earlier play's superstructure of five main characters playing out social roles against a backdrop of clearly typed characters. But the crucial difference is that Wasserstein shows how a comedy full of women no longer needs to be a bitter dead end.

As her subtitle documents, Wasserstein's text is "A Play About Five Women Graduates of a Seven Sisters College Six Years Later." While it begins and ends "Six Years Later" with the five women gathered at a restaurant for lunch, most of the action is a replay of scenes during the characters' senior year at Mount Holyoke. There is no plot. Instead of events and suspense, Wasserstein gives her characters time and peer audiences. As they drift in and out of the play's seventeen episodes, the five main characters set their own paces and create a dramatic forum in which they can leisurely, continually mold, test, and retest their lives and those of their friends. Wasserstein may have discarded the comic plotting that confined Boothe, even in her loosely plotted play, but the later dramatist has not discarded comedy. In a new mode, she presents the same comic search for a resolution, for the comfort of a happy ending.

Sometimes boldly, sometimes fearfully, the five Mount Holyoke seniors relentlessly confront their futures. Kate, a Phi Beta Kappa who loves trashy novels, collects men, and is headed for law school, is the other women's image of success, their Katharine Hepburn. Although she is well on her way to becoming the successful career woman already typed by her friends, Kate has doubts about the "role" she has chosen for herself. She fears becoming "a cold efficient lady in a grey business suit" and laments, "I don't want my life to simply fall into place." "Six Years Later," Kate is still fighting against the constraints of her role as the career woman; she realizes that she has sacrificed as much as she has gained, but she remains admirable in her constant, honest battle within and against a role which isolates her.

Kate's bold insecurity is matched by Rita's willful perverseness. A mouthy, playfully radical feminist preoccupied with tasting her menstrual blood and lecturing her friends on the dangers of a society "based on cocks," Rita refreshes the spirits of the others while restlessly searching for the experiences and feelings that will make her feel whole. Her constant, soon haunting refrain is to proclaim how amazing this group of women will be at ages twenty-five or thirty or forty-five—or somewhere down the road. Pressing achievement conveniently always just out of reach in the future, Rita squares her hope with her disappointments. With her unabating hatred of roles, Rita has not let society pigeonhole her, but she has not yet found a way to fashion a world without the old pigeonholes.

Muffet's and Holly's searches for their futures are less frenetic than either Kate's or Rita's. They wander in and out of Wasserstein's scenes, trying—in their more subdued ways—to fashion their lives somehow out of the old roles which remain the only ones they know and the undefined new ones no one else can describe for them. Wishing for the direction of a Kate or a Rita, Holly slips and slides between the despair and elation of growing up. Her long-distance telephone conversation "to" a man she has only casually met in a museum is touching evidence of her need for a man and her confusion over her preference for the comforting presence of Rita or Kate. Muffet confesses a similar need for men, and like Holly fears planning for the future as much as meeting it.

Holly and Muffet are openly insecure about a future they cannot seem to pattern for themselves; Kate and Rita are much less secure than they know they seem. Yet all four consciously confront a world in which women's roles have become ambiguous and confusing. Unlike theirs, Samantha's position recalls Boothe's simpler, albeit harsher female world. Like Boothe's women, Sam opts for a very traditional marriage, one in which she can dedicate herself to her husband, Robert. She feels no shame about giving herself to her husband and, in fact, radiates self-confidence and contentment that the others all envy. Sam chooses life akin to the values and conditions Boothe traced in The Women, but hers promises happiness that life in The Women could not. Because she consciously chooses a traditional marriage as one of many options open to her, Sam has the potential of being happy as a satellite in Robert's world. The others envy her not because she can so easily choose an established role, but because she can fit into it: they could not. Wasserstein does not make the mistake of preaching that "new" types like Rita and Kate are any more acceptable than "old" types like Sam; she simply provides a context where all such roles coexist and can be studied, challenged, accepted, altered, or dropped.

Wasserstein's expansive plot, her concentration on characters and roles, and her weaving of texture are not unique. Any number of comic playwrights (and many great ones) have preceded her with such mixtures, yet usually without her success in transforming comedy's women. Although in time Wasserstein's transformations will come to seem a matter of degree and not radical alterations, the still significant difference between Wasserstein and predecessors like Boothe is consciousness. Wasserstein is aware that comedy's built-in easy answers to women's problems are deceptive and dangerous; she is aware that comic conventions in and of themselves pressure characters into a limited number of roles. And for now, her ability to translate this awareness to a comic practice that focuses on characters (not roles) and allows these characters to create unified female communities must be viewed as significant. For in creating her community, Wasserstein diffuses comic prejudice against female friendship. Sifting through her treasure chest of Mount Holyoke scenes and characters, Wasserstein allows real female friendships to develop, friendships that have been rare in comedy. Freed from the requirement that they bond only with men (and produce the traditional happy ending), Wasserstein's women can choose to bond with each other.

In the final scene of Act I, Rita—coordinating the others as usual—asks them which one woman they would marry if they could, if women married women. A joyous communal dance grows out of the touching, honest exchange that follows and is our cue that Act I is over. While there are many other direct comments on female friendships in the play, none surpasses this marriage scene in its creation of believable, lasting relationships. Its direct substitution of female-female marriage for the traditional male-female kind must be read as a challenge to a world and comedy that expect otherwise. It is almost as if Wasserstein knew her play could not end this way, so she indulged her dreams and her characters' dreams of togetherness in this wish-fulfilling pseudo-ending. She provides enough evidence elsewhere that her female community is no utopia, for this group of women has its tensions and defections along with its Bacchic idylls.

Wasserstein deals directly with the fragility of such happy communes by creating two very distinct communities in the play. We focus on the five women who will meet again six years later in the restaurant frame of the play—Kate, Rita, Holly, Muffet, and Sam. Yet in our peripheral vision other students remain—Susie Friend, Carter, and Leilah—who are set off not only by their absence from the reunion, but also by the one-dimensional nature of their roles in the Mount Holyoke community. These misshapen shadows of outsiders and failed friendships keep Wasserstein's play from deteriorating into a facile celebration of sorority. Like the hairdressers, the cooks and the attendants in The Women, who offered a background chorus of roles, these three outsiders put a damper on the soaring aspirations of the "uncommon women" by stubbornly reminding them of a world that is still not all that different from Boothe's.

The closing of Uncommon Women and Others is Wasserstein's final statement about these women's roles, as well as her final transformation of comedy. Because the playwright wants it this way, there is no end, only a stopping point. The indeterminateness of her ending is indicated both by the age of Wasserstein's matured women—still only twenty-seven—and by the constant transition they have learned, for better or worse, to accept in their lives. The stopping point of the end is marked as a pause also by Sam's announcement that "Robert and I are having a baby." Sam's announcement is not intended as a parody of the traditional ending of comedy with marriage and the implicit future promise of babies; her solid, lovable character ensures that we respond to her news as warmly as the other women do. Moreover, in Sam's announcement, Wasserstein does not simply embrace the comfortable comic ending which returns the world to an established social order. By making Sam's future as a mother only one part of an otherwise diffuse ending, Wasserstein extracts the joy and assurance of the traditional comic ending without the encumbrance of comedy's predictable return to the status quo. In other words, Wasserstein protects against the reactionary power of the traditional comic ending by setting Sam's future in the context of four other, much less defined futures. All five women, like Wasserstein, know that the happy endings promised in comedy are illusive, but that comedy's joy is not. In this they are uncommon.

Forming her characters as a social unit in a comedy of textures, Wasserstein demonstrates how the delicate relations of women to social roles may be best studied, may be only studied, in an altered comic form. Boothe's comedy about women generated bitterness, complaints, and brittle laughter; Wasserstein's comedy about women nurtures faith, concern, and warm, easy laughter. Community.