The New York-based playwright and author doesn’t second-guess the wisdom of becoming a mother in middle age. And she doesn’t subscribe to any notion that she and women in general need to “have it all.”
As an older mom, “you’re not the youngest thing at the playground, I’ll tell you that,” quips Wasserstein, who picked up both the Pulitzer and a Tony Award in 1989 for her play “The Heidi Chronicles.” On the other hand, “I also think there’s a lot of history for me and [daughter] Lucy to draw on.”
Wasserstein questions the logic of women striving to achieve perfection in both their professional and personal lives. She likens the idea of “having it all” to being a gourmand and suspects the goal was cooked up “as a way of making women feel badly about themselves.”
These days, Wasserstein, a single mom who admits in her latest book that she’s never been much of a cook, has found peace in parenthood. “Now that I have a child, that’s a way I came to doing it all,” she said in a telephone interview from her home in New York.
On Wednesday, June 19, Wasserstein will come to the Marin Jewish Community Center for an evening of conversation with actress Jill Eikenberry. The two haven’t yet mapped out the direction their discussion will take, but Wasserstein says she’s looking forward to the meeting, noting that Eikenberry performed in a 1978 production of her first play, “Uncommon Women and Others.”
Brooklyn-born and Jewish, Wasserstein addresses in her plays and essay collections the themes of family, friendships and the trade-offs faced by professional women. Her recent book “Shiksa Goddess: (Or, How I Spent My Forties)” is a collection of humorous essays that looks at “to-do” lists and other challenges encountered by midlife women.
Given all the attention the essayist and playwright pays to the juggling acts faced by women, Wasserstein seems to have deftly sorted out the issues in her own life.
“I don’t think you can spend your life having regrets,” she says simply.
Though she admits to feeling some degree of pressure to reproduce the success of her award-winning work, Wasserstein says, “The upside is much better than the bad side.”
She still recalls her utter surprise upon learning she’d won the Pulitzer Prize. “I was wearing a Lanz flannel nightgown and I got a call,” she said of that life-altering moment.
These days, her morning routine normally starts with time spent playing with her daughter. She then finds a distraction-free place to work (often a spot in a public library, a favorite venue ever since she was in elementary school). She likes to get home in the late afternoon for more socializing with Lucy Jane. Asked how parenthood has changed her writing process, Wasserstein says, “I waste less time.
“We go out in New York a lot,” she adds. “I take her to see plays already. Sometimes, we’ll just ride escalators in the department store.”
As for the theater, Wasserstein says her daughter recently sat through a production of “Oklahoma.” “She really likes it, she’s riveted.”
She jokes that her message to her daughter is: “You can love the theater, but you’re going to be a doctor.”
Though an “off-and-on” synagogue-goer who has called herself “a High Holy Days Jew,” Wasserstein says the violence in the Middle East “made me want to make sure my daughter had some Jewish education.
“I think being a parent, it really opens up my world so much,” she says. Besides providing an introduction to “a whole generation of 2-year-olds,” parenthood has given her more reason to ponder the future.
Wasserstein hopes to instill in her daughter a sense of commitment to the larger community. “I do think you’re responsible for the world you’re in,” she says.
In her own life, Wasserstein launched a theater program about three years ago for disadvantaged high school students in the New York City public schools. This past year, Wasserstein escorted eight high school students to Broadway and off-Broadway shows followed by pizza and discussion.
“I kind of think it’s your birthright as a New Yorker to see plays,” she says. Likening the theater to a “religious experience,” she says a play “reaches you and it forms you as a person.”