Wendy and the Lost Boys
Page 21
What could be more sophisticated? André came from a world populated by railroad barons and dashing heiresses who defied their families by marrying Jews (his grandmother’s path) or fleeing to Europe and having tragic affairs (as his mother did, before her first marriage). He had grown up among the New York gentry. His summers were spent on Martha’s Vineyard with regular visits to Caramoor, an hour’s drive north of Manhattan, the ninety-acre estate surrounding the Mediterranean-style mansion built by his great-uncle Walter Rosen (the railroad baron) and his wife, the former Lucie Bigelow Dodge.10 But as a boy he was often on his own, and unhappy, having lost his father and not caring much for his stepfather. André was educated at boarding schools, ultimately graduating from St. Paul’s in Concord, New Hampshire, an upper-crust Episcopal school, (alumni include Senator John Kerry and Garry Trudeau, the Doonesbury cartoonist) before following the prescribed path, to Harvard.
André was dimly aware of his Jewish ancestry, far more conscious of his mother’s aversion to her own Jewishness. He was surprised at how attached she became to Wendy. Felice “Fay” Harriman Francis, as she ultimately called herself (after yet another marriage), also didn’t approve of overweight women, but she came to love Wendy and admire her. André felt that in Wendy, his mother—who hadn’t gone to college—saw everything she hadn’t accomplished.
After the Jamaica vacation, everything merged, the personal and the professional. So it seemed natural that, when the time came to promote the play, it became a family affair. The radio ads for Isn’t It Romantic featured their mothers, Lola, Julie, and Fay—formerly Liska, Obdulia, and Felice—bragging about their children.
André’s decision to produce Isn’t It Romantic was regarded as a rescue mission by Wendy’s friends. The play had been commissioned by the Phoenix in 1979, the follow-up to Uncommon Women and Others. Steven Robman had become the Phoenix’s artistic director, so he had even more reason to hope for a repeat success with the playwright.
Wendy’s first version of Isn’t It Romantic opened at the Phoenix on May 28, 1981. While Uncommon Women was remembered as an auspicious production, the Robman-Wasserstein collaboration on Isn’t It Romantic became a sore subject for many people, for different reasons.
Wendy had struggled to find a workable idea for a new play. She wanted to write about her family; she was also drawn to the questions raised in Uncommon Women, now perplexing her in a different way. “I was 28 or so, and suddenly there was this question of all these biological time bombs going off,” she told an interviewer. “I had never thought about it before, because there was this pressure when I was getting out of Holyoke in 1971 to have a career. If you said you were getting married back then, it was embarrassing. And then suddenly, all these people were talking about getting married and having babies. Things had somehow turned around and I was trying to figure it all out.”
Her notebooks in 1980 and 1981 are filled with character sketches and snatches of dialogue, more crossed out than not.
The Phoenix production of Isn’t It Romantic seemed jinxed from the moment the sprinkler system went off onstage, right before a matinee performance. The performance was canceled. A frantic Robman went to the yellow pages and found Disaster Masters, a company that promised to quickly deal with the damage.
When Wendy arrived at the theater, she howled with laughter when she learned that Disaster Masters was coming in to save the day. By the evening performance, everything was up and running. After that, every time something went wrong with the show, Wendy giggled and said, “Let’s call Disaster Masters.”
For Steve Robman, however, Disaster Masters came to sum up the entire experience, and it wasn’t funny. Unlike Uncommon Women, which Wendy had spent years writing and revising in workshops at Yale and then the O’Neill, Isn’t It Romantic went into production direct from the page. And the pages kept changing; Wendy was rewriting throughout rehearsals, until the day the play opened.
“Wendy was bubbling over with humor and information and insights,” said Bob Gunton, the actor playing the Wasp boss having an affair with his employee. “I had the feeling she was trying to cram it all into this already fairly slenderly plotted play. She trusted Steve to help her shape this into a viable evening of theater.”
Robman realized later that they should have taken more time. “I was young and hardheaded or stupid or naïve, thinking we could get the work down in rehearsal,” he said.
Always blunt, Robman had become more critical as time ran out and the pressure built. Now he was no longer a director-for-hire but in charge of the long-running theater company’s artistic destiny. He was counting on Wendy to come up with a success like Uncommon Women. He told her to spend less time eating cookies and more time cutting and revising—in his mind a joke, in hers a jab.
Expectations were high. The New York Times ran an affectionate Sunday preview piece, a profile of Wendy, in which she is described as “one of a growing number of women playwrights currently making their mark on the theatrical scene—and, in the process, broadening its scope.”
Opening night, however, was not a repeat of the joyous celebration that had accompanied Uncommon Women. Steve Robman was tense, already upset with Wendy, who’d told him less than a month earlier that she planned to leave the Phoenix and do her next play at Playwrights Horizons; André Bishop had been building a cadre of writers and asked her to be part of it. He wanted Wendy back in his fold.
Robman and Wendy complained about each other to their friends but maintained a surface of cordiality at work. Following theater custom, Robman gave her an opening-night gift—a gift he would forget about but one that she always remembered. To memorialize his persistent request for cuts, the director presented her with a pair of scissors.
The playwright was not amused.
Wendy never forgave the scissors. Eleven years later, speaking before an audience of theater people and others, Wendy said, “There was this director who shall go nameless who gave me a pair of scissors on opening night because he thought the play was too long,” she said. “My advice is, ‘Don’t work with directors who give you scissors on opening night.’ ”
Walter Kerr, the influential Sunday critic, offered his assessment, on June 29, 1981, the day of the final performance. He began with a disarming preamble, praising the writing for several paragraphs, making it clear that he saw depth beneath the humor” If the playful little bypass is fun, it’s more than that,” he wrote of one exchange. “Its implications—the gap between the lines, the stammer at the heart of things, the tumble into uncertainty—is precisely what author Wasserstein means to write about.”
Except for a zinger calling Janie’s parents “disappointingly clichéd,” the review was complimentary until paragraph eight. There Kerr tossed a dart directly into Wendy’s most sensitive spot, the place where Bob Brustein still lived, whispering that she was nothing more than a witty poseur.
“The one thing I’m not sure of is whether Miss Wasserstein is in any special sense a dramatist,” wrote Kerr. “An explorer, a researcher, a reflective observer, yes.” But a playwright? The review’s title indicates that the answer is no: “Does This Play Need a Stage?” He concluded with praise that felt like a slap. “It seems to me that Miss Wasserstein should think seriously about the future and about the particular literary form—whatever it may turn out to be—that is most congenial to her. She’s too good not to get to the other side.”
While Steve Robman’s career as artistic director at the Phoenix was flailing, André Bishop was turning into the new golden boy of Off-Broadway.
Before he officially became artistic director, he had already begun creating a sensibility for Playwrights Horizons by picking plays that reflected his own. André liked plays that set off what he called an “unconscious click” in his brain. “It’s very personal,” he said. “Someone was once analyzing the plays I like, and said rather cruelly that I choose only plays whose lead characters are variations or projections or fantasies of myself. It may be true.”
Many of the playwrights André produced were friends of Wendy’s, either people he’d met through her or had found in the places where talent gravitated, like the O’Neill. There was also a commonality of age (these playwrights, like André, were almost all in their thirties) and of background (there was a heavy, if not exclusive, bias toward the Ivy League).
“We were sort of a gang,” said Lapine, who became—along with Bill Finn—part of Wendy’s inner circle.
Because of Lapine’s connection there, Playwrights Horizons became the workshop venue for Sunday in the Park with George, by Broadway’s premiere composer-lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, collaborating with Lapine.
“Why am I working off Broadway?” Sondheim echoed a reporter’s question. “Basically, I wanted to write something with Jim Lapine. He’s associated with Playwrights Horizons, so naturally he wanted to do it there.”
As the Reagan era of deregulation and gentrification was beginning, Playwrights Horizons reflected not the ballyhooed 1960s political consciousness of Baby Boomers but the self-involvement that was emerging as a dominant characteristic. “Our ‘social concerns’ really have to do with the quality of our own lives,” said John Lyons, the theater’s casting director. “We tend to want to live well and we’re unhappy when we can’t. Sometimes I feel a twinge about that.”
Lyons further elaborated. “We’re after intelligence, verbal facility, so-phistication, freshness,” he said. “Many of us got into theater in the first place because we wanted some wit, style and, yes, glamour. Put it this way: If Noël Coward and Sam Shepard were both young playwrights submitting to this theater for the first time, we’d produce Coward.”
IN 1983 THE NEW YORK TIMES ANOINTED PLAYWRIGHTS HORIZONS AS THE NEW STAR OF OFF OFF BROADWAY. [THE THEATER’S PLAYWRIGHTS, L TO R: JONATHAN REYNOLDS, CHRISTOPHER DURANG, JAMES LAPINE, TED TALLY, WENDY WASSERSTEIN, WILLIAM FINN, ALBERT INNAURATO]
André Bishop became a darling of the New York Times, no small matter for a producer building a reputation. In the summer of 1983, an article in the New York Times Magazine declared Playwrights Horizons “the most critically acclaimed Off Off Broadway group since Joseph Papp’s Public Theater began in 1967.” A year earlier André had been the subject of an admiring Times profile, under the heading “He Nurtures the Gifted Playwright.”
There he explained the common thread in the plays he produced. “I’m often drawn to work that is not all neatly tied up and beautifully structured,” he said. “I like plays that are lucidly framed, but within that frame, I’m drawn to writing that is unpredictable, that comes at you in strange ways, that astonishes you verbally by expressing strange thoughts.”
The reporter asked André what he thought “drove playwrights to continue at their often unrewarding craft.”
The answer belied a gentle soul. “My feelings about the world are so confused,” André said. “I don’t know why anybody does anything, much less sit alone in a room with pen and paper. I admire them, though. There’s a part of me that’s very much a loner. I mean, in my free time, I have a couple of friends, I have dinner with them, and I love to go out and see other plays. But basically when I have nothing to do, I come home and take bubble baths, and that’s pretty much it.”
Just as Wendy masked her ambition with giggles, André hid his beneath a shy, courtly manner. But when he wanted something, he could be relentless, and he wanted Playwrights Horizons to be noticed.
On December 26, 1982, Walter Kerr wrote an assessment of the past year, in which he drew up a list of the season’s ten theatrical achievements. He began with a eulogy for the Phoenix Theatre, which two weeks earlier had ceased operations after a run of thirty years.
Number five on the list was André Bishop.
“If you are a natural wonderer, and have begun to wonder why a group known as Playwrights Horizons should be proving so much more successful than any other Off Broadway house on 42d Street’s Theater Row, you will probably conclude that there’s a hidden achiever stashed away backstage somewhere, picking the play scripts and putting together the production units,” wrote Kerr. “Your conjecture will be entirely correct, and the name of the artistic director is André Bishop. . . . Hereafter the name should be writ large.”
Wendy, too, was working hard to advance her career. In April 1983 she won an eighteen-thousand-dollar playwright grant from the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. (She was one of 292 scholars, scientists, and artists chosen from 3,571 applicants.) She wrote a one-act play called Tender Offer, a slight, sweet story about a busy father who misses his daughter’s dance recital, for the Ensemble Studio Theatre’s annual festival of short plays. There were offers to write television and movie scripts.
Even before she read Walter Kerr’s advice about trying new literary forms, she had been considering her options. Three years before the Phoenix production of Isn’t It Romantic, she met with an editor at Atheneum Publishers, who followed up with an enthusiastic note: “Have you decided to try your hand at a novel yet? . . . I thoroughly enjoyed our meeting the other month.”
She hadn’t attempted a novel, but she had begun writing the journalistic essays that would become a significant aspect of her career. One of the first, a tongue-in-cheek piece called “The Itch to Hitch” (for which she was paid twenty-five hundred dollars) appeared in the November 1981 issue of Mademoiselle magazine. Peppered with skepticism, sarcasm, and longing, the essay begins:
If I were married, the following problems would be solved: loneliness, insecurity, the difficulty of meeting new people, the OPEC crisis and the real whereabouts of the lost ark of the covenant. Furthermore, I would no longer have $200 phone bills, bad plumbing, any friction with my mother or a compulsion to watch Tomorrow Coast to Coast even though I don’t really like it. If I were married, all my needs would be met by my husband. All my inadequacies would disappear.
For Wendy, now in her thirties, marriage loomed larger as a concern. She addresses her fears—and Lola’s—in Isn’t It Romantic, via Tasha, the character based on Wendy’s mother:
“Unfortunately, Janie, the clock has a funny habit of keeping on ticking,” Tasha tells her daughter. “I want to know who’s going to take care of you when we’re not around anymore.”
But Wendy may have identified more with Lillian—modeled after Aimee Garn’s mother, the publishing executive.
“When I was your age,” Lillian tells her daughter Harriet, who is twenty-nine, “I realized I had to make some choices. I had a promising career, a child, and a husband; and, believe me, if you have all three, and you’re very conscientious, you still have to choose your priorities. So I gave some serious thought to what was important to me. And what was important to me was a career I could be proud of and successfully bringing up a child. So the first thing that had to go was pleasing my husband, because he was a grown-up and could take care of himself.”
Wendy avoided the dilemma by specializing in impossible relationships with inaccessible men. As she began to revamp the play, the Firefly bond with André and Gerry grew stronger. “My husbands,” she called them, as Gerry became involved with Peter Evans, a talented and versatile young actor.11
Her friendship with Frank Rich had quickly evolved into a serious infatuation, though he was married and his older son had already been born. “My relationship with Wendy was very intense during my first marriage,” he said. “I was essentially not terribly happily married, and [my wife] Gail didn’t want to go to the theater. I had two friends, Rafe Yglesias [a novelist and screenwriter] and Wendy, with whom, together or separately, we went to the theater all the time. They became surrogate spouses.”
Rich u
nderstood that Wendy approached her role as surrogate spouse differently than Rafael Yglesias did. “She definitely had a crush on me, and I had sort of a crush on her,” he said. The critic and the playwright had much in common. Both were bright, charming, verbal Jews, driven to be exceptional, using the theatrical arena to do battle with childhood traumas as well as adult demands and desires.
She gave him her scripts to read, and he discussed plays with her. They delighted each other, exchanging gossip and piercing observations about their overlapping worlds. He had someone to endure awful productions with him, who could inject some fun into a dreary evening.
“At one long-forgotten fiasco, we returned from intermission to discover a ‘real’ swimming pool displayed on stage, with an invalid perched in a wheelchair at its edge,” he recalled. “Wendy turned to me with a conspiratorial grin. ‘Honey,’ she said in that husky tone that signaled a punch line was on the way, ‘by the end of this play that woman in the wheelchair will be in that pool.’ (We were not to be disappointed.)”
Many of Wendy’s theater friends disapproved of her relationship with the critic, though he recused himself from reviewing her work. Rich was doubly influential, as chief critic for the Times and as a Baby Boomer who paid special attention to the burgeoning voice of his peers. He was key to the resurgence of Off-Broadway, putting his stamp on what new theater should be. This made him friend and foe, builder and destroyer.