Feminist Performance Criticism and the Popular: Reviewing Wendy Wasserstein

This essay suggests that the taxonomy of feminisms—liberal, cultural, and materialist—while usefully lending precision to our analysis, has inadvertently become hierarchical, privileging materialist feminist projects at the expense of more popular or mainstream plays and productions by liberal feminist playwrights. By returning to the oeuvre of Wendy Wasserstein, the author argues that although some of her initial critical misgivings about the playwright’s relationship to the feminist movement maintain, Wasserstein’s liberal feminist success on Broadway and in regional theatres needs careful consideration for what it accomplished for women. The essay analyzes two recent productions of Wasserstein’s final play, Third, written just before her death from cancer in 2006. Although the Geffen theatre production in Los Angeles panders to anti-or post-feminist perspectives, the Philadelphia theatre company production explores the tensions and contradictions between second-and third-wave feminists in ways both illuminating and useful to contemporary academics and activists.