By almost any standard, playwright Wendy Wasserstein would be described as a success.
Her 1989 play, "The Heidi Chronicles" won the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award. Her 1992 Broadway hit, "The Sisters Rosensweig," was called "the box-office phenomenon of the season" by the New York Times; it recently embarked on an extensive national tour and will come to the Morris A. Mechanic Theatre Tuesday.
Yet, the ebullient playwright, whose head of chestnut curls bounces in accompaniment to her frequent laughter, admits she still feels insecure.
"You find different places to be insecure. It's like a searchlight, so it goes wherever it needs to go," she explains with the same wistful humor that characterizes her plays.
Over afternoon tea at the Harbor Court Hotel, Wasserstein acknowledges that the Pulitzer "in some ways made me feel more secure, so it maybe enabled me to try something else."
What she tried was "The Sisters Rosensweig." A play about the reunion of three middle-aged Jewish-American sisters in London, is, in its own way, a daring endeavor.
"If I went to a movie studio and said, 'I want to do a movie about three sisters, and the oldest one is 54 and she falls in love with a furrier' -- I don't think so," she says.
Nor could this be described as a traditional subject for male-dominated Broadway. In fact, part of the inspiration for "The Sisters Rosensweig" was Wasserstein's desire to write a play starring three middle-aged actresses.
This objective harks back to her graduate school days, when the impetus for her thesis play, "Uncommon Women and Others," was her determination to see an all-female curtain call at the Yale School of Drama. Even today, she says, "There just aren't that many plays in which the focus is about women."
The genesis of "The Sisters Rosensweig" came when Wasserstein was working on "The Heidi Chronicles" in London ** on a grant from the British-American Arts Association. "While I was there I had this idea for a play about Americans abroad because I was an American abroad. And also, I think very specifically, being Jewish and self-loathing was important to me to write about. It was something I had noticed a lot in my own life and in others."
She had attempted to write about similar themes in a 1986 musical called "Miami," about Jews in that city in 1959. The musical "didn't quite work," she says. But an experience she had in connection with it increased her commitment to explore these themes.
"I remember one producer took us out after the show and said to me, 'Wendy, can't you make those people Irish?' " She replied, "Well, no, I don't think so."
The similarity between "The Sisters Rosensweig" and Chekhov's The Three Sisters" is not coincidental. Chekhov is Wasserstein's favorite playwright, and in the preface to the published script she acknowledges "the pretense of echoing those three far more famous stage sisters who yearned for Moscow."
The day she finished the play, she called her close friend and fellow Yale alum, playwright Christopher Durang, and kidded, "This was . . . a lot of effort just to prove to myself what a good playwright Chekhov is."
Nor does it seem coincidental that Wasserstein, 43, is herself one of three sisters. She willingly enumerates the superficial parallels between the Rosensweigs and the Wassersteins. Like the oldest sister in the play, the oldest of the Wasserstein sisters, Sandra Meyer, is divorced and was once a banker (she's now a public relations consultant). The script is dedicated to her.
The middle sister, Georgette Levis, was nicknamed "Gorgeous" as a child, and "Gorgeous" is also the name of the middle sister in the play. Georgette Levis, however, runs an inn in Vermont, unlike her counterpart in the play, who is a radio talk-show host. (There's also a Wasserstein brother, Bruce, a Wall Street merger and acquisitions mogul, who doesn't appear in the play.)
The playwright admits she was "terrified" of her family's reaction to the play. But she says, "They've been very nice about 'The Sisters Rosensweig.' "
She then launches into a favorite story about her sister. "Georgette took an ad out in some paper in Vermont," she begins, with glee. "It said, 'You've seen the play. Now meet the real Gorgeous. Come to the Wilburton Inn.' Priceless. Priceless."
As to the youngest sister, who is called Pfeni in the play, like the playwright she is also an unmarried writer. However, it is Pfeni's boyfriend, a British theatrical director named Geoffrey, to whom Wasserstein feels closest.
Her credo rings out when Geoffrey tells Pfeni: "People like you and me have to work even harder to create the best art, the best theater, the best bloody book . . . that we possibly can. And the rest, the children, the country kitchen, the domestic bliss, we leave to others who will have different regrets. Pfeni, you and I can't idle time."
In Wasserstein's case, the desire not to waste time doesn't mean she's a fast writer. Since 1977, when an expanded version of "Uncommon Women and Others" became her first successful play, she has had only three major produced plays: "Isn't It Romantic," which ran for two years off-Broadway; "The Heidi Chronicles"; and "The Sisters Rosensweig."
In between, she has written essays on subjects ranging from diets to her cousin's bar mitzvah for magazines including Elle, Gentleman's Quarterly, Travel and Leisure, and the now-defunct New York Woman. Four years ago, 29 of these essays were released in book form under the title "Bachelor Girls."
More recently, she has written the screenplay for "The Heidi Chronicles"; the text for a children's book called "Pamela's First Musical," which will be illustrated by set designer Andrew Jackness and is expected to be published by Disney's Hyperion Books next year; the libretto for a new American Ballet Theater production of "The Nutcracker," which debuted in California in December and will be presented at New York's Metropolitan Opera House next month; and a screenplay called "Public Relations," which she says is "about men and women and sort of relationships."
Wasserstein is also in frequent demand as a public speaker -- the role in which she paid her most recent visit to Baltimore. In December, she spoke at a sold-out fund-raiser put on by the Women's Department of the Associated: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore. Because she was starting a new play and wanted to give it her full attention, she agreed to be interviewed for this article on the day of her speech.
The new play is "about a woman whose life is unraveling and who feels slightly out of sync both with her personal life and the times in which she's living," Wasserstein says. She plans to follow the same timetable she did with her last two plays, which she began in January and finished in October. She'll do some of the writing in London, where "The Sisters Rosensweig" will make its British debut this summer.
When she's working on a play at home, Wasserstein tries to spend four hours a day writing. She does so in longhand at a library across Central Park from her apartment on New York's Upper West Side. "It's like being in high school," she jokes.
High school was, in fact, where she began writing plays. Her inspiration was the discovery that she could get out of gym by writing scripts for the school's annual mother-daughter fashion show.
She had, however, fallen in love with the theater long before that. The daughter of a textile manufacturer, Wasserstein spent her early childhood in Brooklyn and her teen-age years in Manhattan. Her mother, who has danced avocationally most of her life, enrolled her in the June Taylor School of Dance as a child, and every Saturday after class, her parents took her to a Broadway matinee.
But while she comes from a family of theater fans -- and even though her maternal grandfather performed in and wrote for the Yiddish theater -- Wasserstein told the audience at the Associated's fund-raiser: "My mother never said, 'Honey, darling, please grow up to be a playwright and put off marriage as much as possible.' "
To the contrary, like the mother in her play "Isn't It Romantic," her mother continues to ask her when she's going to get married. Far from letting this nagging get to her, Wasserstein has grown philosophical about it.
L "I think I'd be quite hurt if she gave up by now," she says.
IF YOU GO . . .
What: "The Sisters Rosensweig"
Where: Morris A. Mechanic Theatre, Hopkins Plaza
When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays; matinees 2 p.m. Wednesdays and Saturdays, and 3 p.m. Sundays. Through May 8. Audio-described performances 2 p.m. April 16 and 8 p.m. April 19; sign-interpreted performances 8 p.m. April 20 and 2 p.m. April 23
Tickets: $17.50-$42.50
9- Call: (410) 625-1400; TDD: (410) 625-1407