In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

{ 1 } \ An Uncommon Woman An Interview with Wendy Wasserstein —JACKSON R. BRYER When, on January 30, 2006, Wendy Wasserstein died of cancer at age fifty-five, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York City, the American theatre suddenly and prematurely lost one of its most eloquent and distinctive voices. Less than four months earlier, on October 24, 2005,Wasserstein’s play Third had premiered at the Mitzi Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center in New York City. Third was an expanded, full-length version of a one-act play with the same title that had its world premiere with another Wasserstein one-act, Welcome to My Rash, in January 2004 at Theater J in Washington, D.C. Wasserstein’s previous full-length plays and musicals include Any Woman Can’t (1973); Happy Birthday, Montpelier Pizz-zazz (1974); When Dinah Shore Ruled the World (with Christopher Durang) (1975); Uncommon Women and Others (1977); Isn’t It Romantic (1983); Miami (1986); The Heidi Chronicles (1988), which won the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award, and the Drama Desk, the New York Drama Critics Circle, the Outer Critics, and the Susan Smith Blackburn awards; The Sisters Rosensweig (1993); An American Daughter (1997); and Old Money (2001). She is also the author of numerous one-act plays; a children ’s book, Pamela’s First Musical (1996); three books of essays, Bachelor Girls (1990), Shiksa Goddess (Or How I Spent My Forties) (2001), and Sloth (2005); a posthumously published novel, Elements of Style (2006); and several screenplays and teleplays. This interview, conducted on March 7, 2004, in the Kogod Theatre of the Clarice Smith Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Maryland in College Park, was certainly not the last interview Wendy Wasserstein gave, but it may well have been one of the last in-depth public conversations in which { 2 } JACKSON R. BRYER she participated. It is published here essentially in its original form; in a few instances , information deemed helpful to the reader has been inserted in brackets , and a few questions from the audience are not denoted as such. For assistance at numerous stages of this project, I thank Carolyn Bain. bryer: Let’s start with a little biography. You were born in Brooklyn but were brought up in Manhattan and went to private school there and then went to Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. Did you know that you wanted to be a writer fairly early on or not? wasserstein: I used to go to the theatre a lot with my parents. I grew up actually taking dancing classes at the June Taylor School of the Dance. They were the dancers on The Jackie Gleason Show that did faux Busby Berkeley dancing . I really am not much of a dancer, but my mother did make me take those classes and then took me to see plays afterwards. When I was in high school, every year we had something at the school called the mother-daughter fashion show, and I quickly realized that if I wrote the show they’d let me get out of gym. I knew nothing about fashion, but I knew I really wanted out of gym! Those were the first shows I wrote in New York. bryer: When you went to college, did you think at that point that you wanted to be an English major or major in writing? wasserstein: No, I was going to be a history major, and then I wasn’t quite clear as to what I’d do. How I ended up taking playwriting was I was at Mount Holyoke and I was studying to become a congressional intern and I was reading the Congressional Digest. I kept falling asleep and my friend Ruth said to me, “Why don’t we take playwriting at Smith and then we can go shopping?” I answered , “I don’t know much about fashion, but I’m sort of interested in shopping . This is a good idea.” So we went there and I actually had the good fortune of having a great college teacher. A man named Len Berkman, who still teaches at Smith, was my playwriting teacher, and really I think in terms of finding...

pdf

Share