Wendy Wasserstein, who won a Pulitzer Prize, a Tony Award and considerable popularity writing comic yet pointed plays and essays about the nagging choices and disappointments that many Baby Boom women encountered on the path to "having it all," died Monday. She was 55.
Wasserstein died at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, according to Andre Bishop, artistic director of the Lincoln Center Theater. The cause of death was lymphoma.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Thursday February 16, 2006 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 37 words Type of Material: Correction
Wasserstein obituary -- An obituary of playwright Wendy Wasserstein on Jan. 31 in Section A stated that she dedicated the play "An American Daughter" to columnists Michael Kinsley and Frank Rich. It was dedicated only to Kinsley.
"She was very much like the women she wrote the plays about," Bishop told The Times. "She connected to people in her plays in a personal way. I think that's what made her distinctive and I think a lot of people -- men and women -- felt as if they knew her through her work."
"Theater has lost its great human, hysterically funny voice. She could break your heart and be hilarious at it," said William Finn, the composer of "Falsettos," who called her death "an immeasurable loss."
Wasserstein secured her place in American theater with four consecutive plays, from "Uncommon Women and Others" (1977) to "The Sisters Rosensweig" (1993) that traced women's progress from college to middle age in the wake of the feminist revolution of the 1960s. Part of their strength and charm, Wasserstein's admirers said, was that they weren't sociological sketches of a generation, but highly personal stories anchored in her own experiences with family and friends.
The third in her informal series, "The Heidi Chronicles," won the Pulitzer Prize for drama and the Tony Award for best play in 1989 -- but it raised some prominent feminist eyebrows, including those of Betty Friedan, for an ending in which a committed feminist art historian, feeling sad, isolated and let down by the movement's lost promise of enduring comradeship and solidarity, decides to adopt a baby.
"I'm just not happy. I'm afraid I haven't been happy for some time," protagonist Heidi Holland says near the end of a long, rambling, extemporaneous speech to her high school alumnae association, supposedly on the achievements and prospects of the women's movement, of which she is considered a distinguished exemplar. "I don't blame any of us. We're all concerned, intelligent, good women. It's just that 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."
