That was the synthesis she was trying to achieve, even though the chaotic momentum of her life often left her little time to think. That’s why she escaped to write, even though her apartment at One Fifth was plenty spacious for a woman and her cat.
With The Sisters Rosensweig she hoped to address, directly, her lifelong search for identity. In the summer of 1991, Wendy spent an extended stretch of time in Bridgehampton working on her play about three sisters. The eldest, a barely disguised Sandra Meyer, by then working at Citicorp, is Sara Goode, fifty-four, a high-powered banker and New York Jewish expatriate, divorced and living in London. Like Sandra, Sara cooks delicacies such as cassoulet. Like Sandra, Sara has recovered from “female trouble”; at age forty-seven, Sandra had been diagnosed with breast cancer, was successfully treated, and went on to become a top-ranking executive at one of the world’s largest banking companies.
The youngest is Pfeni (formerly Penny) Rosensweig, forty, peripatetic world traveler and writer, never married, involved in a three-year affair with a world-renowned director and bisexual. The middle sister is Gorgeous Teitelbaum, a suburban housewife with an outsize personality. She was inspired in part by Wendy’s sister Georgette—the real Gorgeous—but was more outrageous, like Lola.
The occasion for their reunion is Sara’s birthday. Other guests include Pfeni’s bisexual lover; Sara’s hypersophisticated teenage daughter and her working-class boyfriend; and Mervyn Kant, a New York Jewish widower, who romances Sara.
The play is filled with bright chatter that covers much territory, ranging from Eastern European politics to Manolo Blahnik shoes. Sara invokes Shakespeare; Gorgeous laments her imitation Louis Vuitton. Pfeni, most often, is on the sidelines, ceding the play’s strongest moments to her sisters, although Wendy used the play to describe her breakup with Terrence.
“I love you,” Pfeni’s boyfriend, Geoffrey, says to her. “I will always love you. But the truth is, I miss men.”
The Sisters Rosensweig is Wendy’s most deliberately Jewish play, beginning with the title. Daniel Sullivan, who would direct, felt the play was her way of trying to understand the path her life had taken. “The idea of coming home and a sense of rootlessness was a reason she wrote the play,” he said. “Jewishness became a very important thing in it, because that was part of home to her. She had grown very far from that, and it was something she wanted to look at.”
It took Wendy a long time to name the play; the title’s ethnicity was deliberate. In May she typed a long list of possible titles—forty-two of them, none using the Rosensweig name. They included Mother’s Gems, Three Little Sisters, Reunion in London, Womenfolk, Sisterfolk, Tempest in a Teapot, Crumpets and Lox, and Thicker Than Water.
When producers tried to discourage her from the overtly Jewish title, she stuck with The Sisters Rosensweig.
Chekhov was one inspiration; Flatbush was another.
Like Sandra Meyer, Sara Goode has dropped all traces of Brooklyn from her inflection and manner and is annoyed at her youngest sister for reminding her of their Jewish roots.
“Pfeni, there’s something very ‘New York’ about your tone today,” the eldest sister scolds.
Sara’s daughter Tessie inquires, “What do you mean, New York?”
Pfeni explains, recalling the story of a man named Harry Rose, head salesman at their father’s factory, who called their house every morning.
“Tess, Mr. Rose liked to catch Grampa to discuss the day’s business just when the entire house would be waking up,” Pfeni says. “So every day at seven A.M., I’d rush to pick up the phone just to hear Mr. Rose say, ‘Hallo, Maury, is that you?’ And then I’d answer, ‘No, Mr. Rose, it’s me. Maury’s daughter Penny.’ And he’d always say, ‘Vell, excuse me for living, Penny, but how could you recognize it vas me?’ ”
Tess gets it. “So Mr. Harry Rose was New York?”
Her mother dismisses the story. “New York in a way that has very little to do with us. Pfeni’s the one who’s guilty of revisionist history, my luv. Pfeni’s the one who’s romanticized a world we never belonged to.”
Pfeni retorts. “I was mistaken,” she says sarcastically. “Mr. Rose never called our house every morning. It was Louis Auchincloss [the quintessential Wasp novelist, whose subject was New York’s blueblood society].”
Sara Goode’s prickly character was recognizably Sandra’s. The eldest Wasserstein sibling intimidated most of Wendy’s friends.
Terrence McNally found Sandra formidable. “You could sort of feel Sandy’s disapproval if she didn’t like something,” he said. She had seen a painting in Terrence’s home that she liked and asked him if she could meet the artist, a friend of Terrence’s. He recalled taking her to the man’s studio, and the artist began showing them his paintings. “She said the most horrible things about his work, and he was there,” said Terrence.
He mimicked her.
“Look at that tree! Who would paint a tree like that? What street in New York is purple?”
Terrence was mortified. He hadn’t wanted to take her, but Sandra had insisted. She’d just built a house in the Hamptons and was interested in buying some paintings. She told Terrence not to worry; she loved the man’s work.
He didn’t understand why she didn’t just say thanks and wait until they were in the car to comment. “Wendy would be totally incapable of that kind of cruelty,” he said.
If anything, Wendy used her work to cast her family in a more favorable light, sometimes sacrificing dramatic tension for wishful thinking. In real life Sandra’s true love had died before they could marry. In her fictionalized version, Wendy determined to create an unlikely love affair, one that would bring her sister unexpected happiness.
She would be criticized by some for her sentimental desires.
“Wasserstein evokes Chekhov, but ‘The Sisters Rosensweig’ is marshmallow and adorable rather than penetrating, compassionate and great,” wrote Lloyd Rose, reviewing the 1994 Kennedy Center production, in the Washington Post. “Obviously there’s nothing wrong with Wasserstein’s little lessons: Be true to your roots; face up to reality; when Mr. Right comes along, grab him. But her preachments are made in an unreal world . . . . a place without envy, maliciousness, self-destructive impulses or any problem that can’t be solved with a loving face-to-face.”
The draft was completed in October, just as Wendy was about to turn forty-one. The day she finished writing it, she called Chris Durang and said, “This has been a hell of a lot of effort just to find out what a good playwright Chekhov is.”
She gave the play to André, who was struggling to find his footing at Lincoln Center, despite the help of Bernard Gersten, longtime producing partner of Joe Papp at the Public, who remained at Lincoln Center after André’s predecessor, Gregory Mosher, left. But André felt that he had hit the ground running and hadn’t landed very gracefully. He hadn’t developed a strong plan for the next season and was feeling distraught.
“Sisters Rosensweig basically saved my ass,” he said.
He and Dan Sullivan repeated Heidi’s path. There was a reading at Lincoln Center in February, and then a workshop at the Seattle Repertory Theatre. Like all Wendy’s plays, this one was too long, but now André knew that the playwright had become expert at cutting and revising, once she saw actors in performance.
During the readings Wendy was disconcerted to discover that the play expected to be her most serious work had turned out to be a comedy. “The laughter was uncontrollable,” said André. “I remember Wendy staring at me, and saying, ‘I can’t believe this!’ ”
It was a matter of casting. The part of Gorgeous had gone to Madeline Kahn, the dizzy, sexy comic genius who became well known for her roles in Mel Brooks movies. In Young Frankenstein, Kahn played a Transylvanian-American princess; in Blazing Saddles she played Lili Von Shtupp, a torch singer with a thick Teutonic accent, her costume consisting mainly of a bustier.
The minute Kahn appeared onstage in The Sisters Rosensweig, the audience laughed.
Wendy went back to her hotel and wrote the line that appears in the play: “You can’t judge a book by its cover, but you’re in the wrong library.”
As Wendy’s play became funnier, her life became more sober. While she was in Seattle, she received a telephone call from Sandra. After seven years in the clear, she’d been diagnosed with a recurrence of breast cancer.
That evening Wendy sat in the audience and watched as the youngest sister, a writer, confessed to her oldest sister, a successful banker, “There is no one I rely on in life more than you. There is no one I am more grateful to than you.”
The playwright began to cry and then stopped.
“In an almost Pirandellian stroke my own character version of my sister cut off my self-indulgence,” Wendy wrote.
Onstage Sara Goode impatiently responds to her sister’s poignant outpouring. “Pfeni, don’t, and I won’t,” she says, picking up a newspaper to end her sister’s profession of needy adoration.
When she returned to New York, Wendy accompanied Sandy to an oncologist who prescribed tamoxifen and told her, unhelpfully, that if the drug had been available after her first diagnosis, the recurrence might not have happened.
“I am to learn that breast cancer treatment is a never-ending saga of ‘If only we had had this when you had that, but you never know what’s coming next, so just hang in there.’ ” Wendy wrote.
That night Wendy slept at Sandra’s and resolved to open The Sisters Rosensweig in New York for her sister.
The subsequent months tried her fortitude in a way in which she hadn’t been tested before. In the summer of 1992, in addition to dealing with Sandy’s illness, Wendy tended to two of her closest friends, both of whom were hospitalized with life-threatening conditions.
Two years earlier Bill Finn—another playwright friend from Playwrights Horizons—had been diagnosed with an arterial venous malformation of the brain; he was told at first that it was inoperable. In 1992, after winning a Tony for Falsettos,14 he was hospitalized, facing surgery that could cure him or kill him.
Wendy came to see him every day for a month.
He was amazed she was always there. Even before The Heidi Chronicles, he had never known anyone who was so well connected or so busy. Afterward he couldn’t imagine how she managed the demands on her life.
“When we walked down the street, all these sixty-five-year-old Jewish ladies would come up to Wendy, and she would talk to them,” he said. “They’d talk about their husbands and their daughters, and when they left, I’d ask her who was that, and she’d say, ‘I have no idea.’ This went on constantly. People embraced her as if she were going to explain their lives to them.”
The doctors told Finn they would insert a brain shunt and warned him that on the day of the procedure he couldn’t eat.
On the scheduled day, the time kept moving, from 6:00 A.M. to noon to 3:00, 4:00, and 5:00. Then he learned that the procedure had been postponed.
Finn was a large man who didn’t like to miss a meal, and he’d missed all of them that day. While he was prone to being overdramatic, he was being realistic when he said he believed that this meal could be his last. He surveyed his room, full of visitors, and when his eyes landed on Wendy, he decided he wanted her to get his dinner. Wendy always knew where to go.
Wendy left and returned with roast chicken, mashed potatoes, and a vegetable from Sam’s Cafe, the celebrity hangout run by Stephen Crisman, husband of Mariel (nickname “Sam”) Hemingway, actress and granddaughter of the famous author.
“It was the best meal of my life,” Finn said. “I felt like I was dying. Wendy knew what to get. If someone said to me, name one meal you would like to relive, that’s the meal.” It wasn’t his last meal; he lived.
Gerry Gutierrez was also severely ill, with throat cancer.
Wendy was there for him, too, shuttling between hospitals.
A few months later, having survived his treatment, Gutierrez sent Wendy a note telling her how meaningful her help had been.
“I will NEVER be able to fully express to you how deeply grateful I am and always will be for your strength and loyalty and love during this summer ‘ordeal,’ ” he wrote. “If I think too long about how you and André were always with me—at every step—and once in a cab going downtown you used the word ‘WE’ to say ‘we can beat this’ . . . I start to cry. I fell in love with you all over again at that moment in that cab.”
When he wrote the note, he had just seen The Sisters Rosensweig.
Watching—and at times being part of, your life in the theatre—makes me extremely proud. For as long as I have known you, you were always witty—so were your plays. You could always move me—as did your plays. With Heidi I wept with joy at the new depth, intelligence and clear articulation of the things you HAD to say—without losing any of your wit and sensitivity. Your new play adds an even deeper understanding of the human condition with the addition of—dare I say it—melancholy—and (again) without losing your wit and sensitivity. It’s like your music has suddenly added the cello section.
He concluded:
I look forward, with enormous excitement, to the miracles in our work and in our lives, that our love and friendship can accomplish together.
I love you. Gerry xxox
The Sisters Rosensweig didn’t pile on prizes the way Heidi had, though Madeline Kahn won a Tony for Best Actress in a Drama. But the play was a crowd-pleaser and opened in theaters around the country. Its substantial run began with a ticket-selling review from long-standing supporter Mel Gussow, in the New York Times (“Captivating. . . . The play offers sharp truths about what can divide relatives and what can draw them together”). The play began at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center on October 22, 1992, and moved to the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway on March 18, 1993.
The Sunday before opening night at Lincoln Center, a feature article in the New York Times took note of the “tremendous amount” of publicity that surrounded Wendy Wasserstein (while contributing to it):
Part of the explanation may be that she is very much a local hero, or heroine—a New York gal. There’s an Upper West Side sensibility in all her work, a sensibility shared by the traditional New York theatergoing audience—male and female alike. She’s a local girl made good on the local stage, which happens to be in New York, as are many of the talk shows on which she has promoted herself and her work. Not for nothing does Ms. Wasserstein hail from a family of entrepreneurs.
As Wendy rummaged through family history to develop The Sisters Rosensweig, she began longing to discover the past that Lola had so firmly left behind. Therefore she was eager to accept when Sandra invited her on a Citicorp-sponsored trip to Poland, in the spring of 1993, right after The Sisters Rosensweig opened on Broadway.
As they followed “the Lola Schleifer Wasserstein Freedom Trail,” Wendy began to understand the lives that had preceded hers. “Driving along with my big sister, who knew my grandfather Shimon, I imagine his escape through this countryside north to Gdansk, and his remaining friends and their families being herded like cattle on this road for the final solution.”
For Wendy this was a rare acknowledgment of the Holocaust, and of her family’s connection to the greatest of Jewish tragedies.
During the trip she was focused on a more immediate sorrow. In the preceding months, it had become evident that Sandra was growing more fragile. The week before The Sisters Rosensweig opened, she’d broken her arm while putting on her pantyhose.
Wendy’s desire to have a child became frantic, though she didn’t tell Sandra why. “My fertility had become in my mind the parallel antidote to her cancer,” Wendy wrote.
She plunged into the brave new world of in vitro
fertilization. Once again she was at the forefront of the zeitgeist. In 1992, three years after The Heidi Chronicles created a stir with Heidi’s decision to become a single mother, a popular television series followed suit and set off a national debate. Dan Quayle, Republican vice-presidential candidate, was both praised and chastised for saying that Murphy Brown, the character played by Candice Bergen, undermined “the importance of fathers by birthing a child alone.”
Three years after Wendy began fertility treatments, the September 4, 1995, cover of Newsweek blared, “Infertility: High-Tech Science Fails 3 Out of 4 Infertile Couples. Has the Hype Outweighed the Hope?”
The article was a compendium of heartbreaking stories, medical fact and fancy, filled with intimidating initialisms: IUI (intrauterine insemination), IVF (in-vitro fertilization), GIFT (gamete intrafallopian transfer), ZIFT (zygote intrafallopian transfer).
In 1993 the American Society for Reproductive Medicine reported daunting statistics. Of 41,209 assisted-reproduction procedures reported by participating clinics, 8,741 had resulted in live births, a success rate of 21.2 percent.
“There’s nothing like sitting in a fertility doctor’s office looking at the photos of children they’ve nudged into creation and knowing you’re the negative statistic,” Wendy wrote. “It becomes an addictive, undermining dream.”
When her egg count dropped, her fertility doctor suggested she begin injecting Pergonal—a fertility drug—intramuscularly, to increase the volume.
“You know my sister has cancer,” she told him.
He replied, “Yes, of course I know that.”
She was blunt. “So is this Pergonal an insane thing to do?”
He said, “We have no data that proves that.”
She said sarcastically, “But eventually you will.”
Wendy and the Lost Boys Page 29
