Wendy had begun to live two lives. There was the pudgy “loser”—failed law-school applicant, noncommittal girlfriend, unemployed part-time student, unsuccessful freelance writer. And there was the emerging artist, gaining control of her craft as she reconstructed the people who loved her—and who sometimes drove her crazy—into characters whose behavior she could dictate.
The subject that began to occupy her writing most intensely was Bruce’s marriage to Lynne. Wendy didn’t criticize her brother aloud, but she didn’t approve of his attitude and behavior toward his wife. She was also jealous, aware that Lynne provided a sexual connection with which Wendy could not compete—so she belittled it.
She felt Lynne had trivialized herself by her willingness to be Bruce’s sex object and helpmate rather than have a career of her own. She considered Lynne’s interest in collecting gemstones and making jewelry a hobby, and a lame one at that, though Lynne took her craft seriously.
Wendy was refining her methodology, becoming more comfortable with the process of fictionalization. In a short story called “A Solid Gold Blender,” she worked the same familial territory but produced a far more polished result. The wild humor is corralled. She is starting to see the importance of timing.
The story is about a super-brilliant young man named Mark, described thusly:
Even though he had gained forty pounds to out-weigh the draft, Mark had basically been on his mother’s good side ever since he had advance-placed into Yale Law, Economics, and Architecture at nineteen. A truck driver eating Twinkies is a fat truck driver. A genius eating Twinkies is still a genius.
Lynne of Larchmont, Bruce’s wife, is cast as Greta of Greenwich, “debutante-in-law,” Mark’s wife.
In the past, coming to her mother-in-law’s had always given her a headache, and she came equipped with Librium. But today she brought her Rock Rascal polishing machine and was content to concentrate on polishing her booty from a month’s rock hounding in Wales. While the counter-culture went to Woodstock, Greta went to rock fairs in Cardiff.
Whenever Greta tries to have a serious conversation with Mark, he condescends: “Princess, hush. Play with your rocks.”
Joyce, the Wendy character, is at loose ends:
Joyce deliberated how to fill the time til “Saturday Night at the Movies.” She hadn’t read in months. Months, how many “As the World Turns” had passed? Did Jesse have her baby? She resolved the day’s possibilities. Today I will try not to think about myself, and not to run into my mother. Today I will go to the museum. No, too intellectual. A movie? Takes too long. A store? Too crowded. An employment agency? Can’t handle it. An apartment agency? No job. A friend? Too parasitic, too many questions, too much dope, too flagellating. Go to Charles.
Charles, modeled on Jamey Kaplan, is the reliable young man Harriet (the mother) wants Joyce to marry, who refers to his girlfriend as “Blimp-child.”
This unpublished story contains many themes that Wendy frequently revisited, all revolving around the relationships between spouses, friends, lovers, siblings, parents, and children.
Alone in her childhood room, Joyce reflects, in a telling moment:
There was nowhere to go and she didn’t really want to leave. She never wanted to marry Charles, she just thought he’d be good to be divorced from—responsible payments. In fact, she never loved or trusted anyone outside the family. At least they were unique, at least they loved her.
While Wendy was at CCNY reworking the characters and ideas in “A Solid Gold Blender” into the form of a play, Robert Moss was in the early stages of creating Playwrights Horizons, the nonprofit theater that would become Wendy’s theatrical home. In doing so, Moss was changing the landscape of New York theater.
It was the era of Joseph Papp, who had become an establishment unto himself as the political climate shifted, and social mores were changing. The counterculture was going mainstream. Papp had become a dominating force in the noncommercial theater, creating the New York Shakespeare Festival, offering free productions in Central Park. At his Public Theater in Greenwich Village, he championed new playwrights and actors and was one of the first producers to put black actors and other minorities into Shakespearean roles. Then he became a Broadway impresario, when he moved the rock musical Hair uptown from the Public, where it would become one of Broadway’s longest-running shows.
This was the theater world in which Bob Moss came of age. In 1963 he began work as a production stage manager of the Phoenix Theatre, an inventive repertory house. Radiating effusive innocence, he was a nonstop worker and a nonstop booster of theater. His enthusiasm and charm could transform the most devout pessimist into an optimist.
In 1970 Edward Albee asked Moss to run the Playwrights Unit, the theater Albee had established with the profits from his first full-length play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
The Playwrights Unit offered writers an alternative to Broadway, where the financial stakes were high and led to creative decisions that weren’t necessarily based on artistic considerations. At the Unit money didn’t matter, because there wasn’t any.
Audiences came to see works in progress by new playwrights, some destined for obscurity, others for fame. Among those in the latter category were Sam Shepard, Adrienne Kennedy, Lanford Wilson, and John Guare. Moss introduced every play, explaining that the work shouldn’t be judged as a finished product and that the audience reaction was part of the process. “I wasn’t apologizing,” he said, “just trying to set a lens through which people could look at the plays.”
In the spring of 1971, Albee decided to close the Playwrights Unit. A few weeks later, Moss got a call from Louise Roberts, who had been the director of the June Taylor dance school—where Wendy and Georgette had taken dance lessons as a girl.
Roberts had become director of the Clark Center for the Performing Arts, a not-for-profit dance company that was housed in the YWCA branch at Fifty-first Street and Eighth Avenue—the same building where Alvin Ailey started his dance troupe in the 1960s.
Roberts called Moss to say she had an unused room on the second floor that was too small for dance class—about fifteen feet by thirty. She thought it might work as a writing studio for playwrights. “Nothing will come of that,” Moss heard himself saying. “Why don’t you just give me the room?”
She agreed. That kind of gee-whiz showbiz moment became far less possible in subsequent years, when even Off-Broadway productions required a substantial investment. “I suddenly had real estate, secretarial, janitorial, Con Ed,” said Moss. “The only thing I didn’t have was money. You didn’t need money in those days.”
Almost immediately Moss started putting on plays, getting by with rudimentary lighting, makeshift costumes and props, dressing rooms jerryrigged from janitors’ closets by a stairwell. The shows were barely one step up from a rehearsed reading, but they gave playwrights the valuable opportunity to see their work staged and to gauge audience response.
The new theater was named Playwrights Horizons. Moss had taken the mailing list from Playwrights Unit before it closed, a valuable asset. The audience responded: Within six months they were packing the tiny house with seventy people a night. Moss was inundated with plays. At first he scheduled thirty plays a year; each ran for twelve performances. He added a second show at 10:00 P.M. for one-acts and plays he didn’t think were as strong; these ran for five performances. Ted Danson, Tommy Lee Jones, and Stockard Channing were among the young actors who showed up on the bill at the Clark Center.
Early in 1973 Louise Roberts called Moss to ask a favor. She’d run into a woman whose daughter used to take classes at the June Taylor dance school. The daughter was studying with Israel Horovitz at CCNY and had written a play. Would he take a look?
He agreed to read Any Woman Can’t by Wendy Wasserstein, a one-act she described as “the story of a girl who gives up and gets married after blowing an audition for tap-dancing class.” Moss liked Wendy when they met. He thought her play was funny but insubstantial. He put it
in the 10:00 P.M. slot for five nights that April.
The play was Wendy’s response to Any Woman Can!, a guide to sexual and personal fulfillment published in 1971 by David Reuben, a physician and “sex expert,” who had gained national notoriety two years earlier with the publication of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask). The play’s story is essentially “The Solid Gold Blender” in dramatized form. The heroine—Wendy’s alter ego—is called Christina. She is a recent Smith College graduate now working as an instructor at a Fred Astaire Dance Studio. Her boyfriend, Charles—modeled on James—is a straitlaced young man who alternately criticizes and seduces Christina, referring to her as “Teeny” and “Pet Tuna.” Christina has an overweight, overbearing boy-genius brother (like Bruce), who patronizes his gem-collecting wife (like Lynne).
During the play’s brief run, Wendy’s family and friends trooped into the Clark Center to see what she’d been up to at CCNY.
James Kaplan soon recognized himself in Charles. It was like seeing himself in a funhouse mirror, except that the distortion was not much fun. It was hard not to feel sucker-punched when Charles’s girlfriend, the Wendy character, yells at him, “I’m not ‘ladylike.’ I’m not one of those nice girls all your friends at Princeton kept as masturbating dollies. I hate your friends, and I hate you.”
James couldn’t bring himself to confront Wendy directly. He suggested afterward that maybe the actor hadn’t played the role properly. She saw how hurt he was, so she agreed. She said something about “poetic license.”
She told him, “You can’t view characters in a play as real.” He accepted her explanation, though he knew that changing details like Yale to Princeton didn’t cushion the harsh judgment being rendered.
He wondered what he was supposed to think, when Christina says, “I was just being cool and biding time in college until something happened to me. Nothing happened. Look, here I am with you.”
They continued to see each other, even though Wendy reported to James that someone had said to her, with surprise, “You’re still going out with that guy?”
Bruce had read the play and urged Lynne not to go see it, but he didn’t tell her why. She ignored him. She still thought of Wendy as her best friend and wouldn’t miss the production of her first play.
Lynne went to the Friday-night performance of Any Woman Can’t. When she saw a version of herself lying on a rug playing with rocks, she was annoyed. She was a member of the New York Lapidary Society and considered herself a craftswoman, not some bimbo.
She thought it was pretty silly—until the play struck an essential nerve. Mark, the Bruce character, has just sent his wife into the kitchen to get him a Yoo-Hoo, “like a good girl.” After she leaves, Christina—the Wendy stand-in—says to her brother, “I wouldn’t let someone treat me the way you treat her.”
Over the weekend Lynne couldn’t stop thinking about Wendy’s evaluation of her marriage—and of her. Bruce was interesting and intelligent and exciting, but what was Lynne? Suddenly she knew. Lynne was unhappy.
That Sunday evening she and Bruce were working on their taxes. They began arguing over who should balance the checkbook. As the fight escalated, Lynne glanced at the television. Mayerling, the movie that was on in the background, seemed like an omen. There were Omar Sharif and Catherine Deneuve, playing doomed lovers at the end of the Hapsburg Empire.
Just after midnight Lynne called her parents and asked them to come and get her. Subsequently she told Bruce she wouldn’t come back to him unless they went to a marriage counselor.
“He said, ‘If you don’t like it, get out,’” she recalled. “I didn’t like it, I got out. He was not a flexible person.”
Wendy would come to hate Any Woman Can’t. In 1997, in a lengthy interview with Laurie Winer, a drama critic, in the Paris Review, Wendy mentioned the play, and Winer said, “I’ve never seen it.”
“And you never will,” Wendy replied. “It’s an awful play.”
Yet she had sent that “awful” play to the Yale Drama School as part of her application for entry in the fall of 1973. By the time Any Woman Can’t was performed at Playwrights Horizons, Wendy had already been accepted at both Yale Drama and Columbia Business School and was leaning toward New Haven.
After the reading, Bob Moss said to her, “Why do you have to go? You can’t learn playwriting in school.”
But Wendy believed in the power of pedigree and connections. She chose Yale. The school became an important stepping-stone, though not exactly in the way she might have expected.
CHRIS DURANG AND MERYL STREEP,
SUPERSTARS AT YALE DRAMA WHEN WENDY
WAS THERE, HERE IN A PRODUCTION OF
THE IDIOTS KARAMAZOV, WRITTEN BY
DURANG AND ALBERT INNAURATO.
Seven
DRAMA QUEENS AND KINGS
1973-76
The spring before Wendy arrived at Yale, Christopher Durang had already begun to anticipate her arrival. As a work-study student, then in his second year, he had a job in the bursar’s office and sneaked a look at her application. He insisted that he wasn’t in the habit of snooping through the files of applicants but confessed he couldn’t resist spying on this one. He had heard that Richard Gilman had read a play by somebody named Wendy Wasserstein and liked it. Gilman, a respected critic, was the professor at the school who pretty much determined which playwrights were chosen. This Wasserstein woman was therefore likely to be admitted.
Chris was intrigued, especially when he saw recommendations from Joseph Heller, the bestselling novelist, and from Israel Horovitz, a well-known playwright. Then he looked at her photo. “Her arms were crossed, and she looked really grouchy, not a friendly person,” he recalled. “She looked defensive and/or maybe hostile and/or definitely suspicious of the world.” The play that was part of her admissions package carried a title Chris thought to be vaguely confrontational: Any Woman Can’t.
Warily, he began reading the play, anticipating a feminist screed. Everything seemed to be political then. On April 30, 1973, about the time Chris was reading Wendy’s application, Richard M. Nixon made his first public reference to Watergate, the political burglary that would end his presidency. The war in Vietnam had shifted to Cambodia, where U.S. bombs were devastating the country. The Supreme Court had, in January, issued a landmark decision, Roe v. Wade, which in declaring that women had the constitutional right to an abortion ignited an intractable political battle resonant with biblical ferocity and certitude.
Chris Durang was not apolitical, but he preferred humor to harangues. Descended from a lineage of alcoholics and depressives, many of whom were artists, he began writing plays in third grade. However, the precocious boy didn’t start plumbing the darker corners of existence until his freshman year at Harvard, when he wrote, directed, and acted in a play called Suicide and Other Diversions. The play that had won him entry to Yale Drama, The Nature and Purpose of the Universe, was a comedy based on the book of Job. Howard Stein, the associate dean at the drama school, described Durang’s work “as a scream for help in a world he knows provides none. So he keeps on screaming and laughs at it.”
As Chris began reading Any Woman Can’t, he was surprised to find himself laughing, almost from the beginning. The story of a young woman trying to figure out what to do with the rest of her life was told with self-deprecating humor. He found the writer’s amusing depiction of the dating scene human, not didactic. His curiosity was even stronger than before.
When school resumed in the fall, he hoped to take a class with Terrence McNally, an up-and-coming playwright teaching a seminar at Yale that year. But McNally was a hot item; his class filled quickly, and Chris was stuck with a teacher he sensed was going to be a bore.
Soon he recognized a possible diversion. There was Wendy Wasserstein, hunkered down with her arms crossed, looking grouchy, just as she had in the photograph he’d seen in her application folder. Despite her forbidding appearance, because he’d read her play and tho
ught it was funny, he felt they might be kindred spirits. “You must be very smart to be bored so quickly,” he said slyly, with the cherubic smile that led Robert Brustein, head of the drama school, to fondly refer to him as “a choirboy with fingers dipped in poison.”
Wendy responded with the expression Chris would always associate with her. “Her face lit up, and she laughed and laughed, and I felt that I had met Wendy,” he said. When she told him that a professor had once called her a “vicious dumpling,” he understood why. The rapier intelligence and shrewd wit, which could be delightfully rude, were kept wrapped inside that shy, unthreatening chubby-girl exterior.
The story of their first meeting would become part of their repertoire; Wendy incorporated it into The Heidi Chronicles. Her heroine Heidi meets a boy she would fall in love with at a high-school dance. His name is Peter Patrone. Their first exchange:
Peter: You must be very bright.
Heidi: Excuse me?
Peter: You look so bored you must be very bright.
After class Chris invited Wendy for a cup of coffee. When he had to leave, he felt they had much more to say to each other. They met again for drinks the next day
She was a giggler; he was a mischief maker. They shared a cockeyed view of the world but could be quite serious, especially after their friendship deepened, and they began revealing secrets to each other. When Chris confessed that he had peeked at her application, Wendy admitted that before she arrived at Yale she had studied the list of people who were already there. When she saw “Christopher Durang, Harvard College, author of The Nature and Purpose of the Universe,” she told him, she assumed he would be a scary, smart Harvard jock full of self-confidence. They were both amused by the odd assumptions they’d made about each other and quickly became inseparable.
Wendy was smitten. “She provided 24/7 worship,” said Albert Innaurato, a classmate of Chris’s, who like Wendy had had an early play produced at Playwrights Horizon by Bob Moss.
Wendy and the Lost Boys Page 12
