new york | Playwright Wendy Wasserstein was known for her wry portrayal of strong, conflicted women.
While not always overtly Jewish, her characters still bore the mark of the playwright’s traditional Jewish upbringing in New York.
Wasserstein died of lymphoma Monday, Jan. 30 in New York at the age of 55.
Wasserstein wrote “in ways that are profoundly Jewish,” said Joyce Antler, professor of American Jewish history and women’s studies at Brandeis University.
She expressed “the modern dilemma of American women with a Jewish accent, a Jewish sensibility,” Antler said.
Said the editor in chief of Lilith magazine, Susan Schneider: “She may be the only playwright of national stature to capture, moment by moment, the changing lives of women in the last part of the 20th century.”
Wasserstein’s works included “The Heidi Chronicles,” for which she won a Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award in 1989, and “The Sisters Rosensweig,” which featured three middle-aged Jewish siblings who come together in London for a birthday party.
The lead protagonist in her first play, “Uncommon Women and Others” in 1977, is Holly, a Jewish woman in the last year of an elite women’s college similar to Mount Holyoke, Wasserstein’s alma mater.
The play continues six years later when Holly and her friends reunite over lunch to compare life paths.
Wasserstein’s characters mostly aged with her, and continued in this vein: strong, interesting and passionate, if conflicted.
Wasserstein’s best-known work, “The Heidi Chronicles,” covers the life of Heidi, a feminist art historian, over the span of a few decades, from a dance school in 1965 to her decision to adopt a child and become a single mother in 1989 — a mirror to Wasserstein’s own decision to have a baby by herself in 1999.
In addition to about a dozen plays, Wasserstein’s oeuvre included two collections of essays, “Bachelor Girls” and “Shiksa Goddess: or, How I Spent My Forties”; the non-fiction work “Sloth,” a parody of a self-help book; and a forthcoming novel.
Her plays might have been loosely autobiographical, but her essays were frank discussions of events in her life, like her decision to have Lucy Jane, born in 1999.
“She followed a path from career woman to being a Jewish mother,” Antler said. And though she didn’t follow the traditional route, “she is the voice of her generation as a proud Jewish mother.”