Wendy and the Lost Boys (20 page)

He got on the telephone and found about a dozen Mount Holyoke graduates willing to paper the house, enough to fill the fourth row—which happened to be right behind Richard Eder, the
New York Times
critic.

Cavanaugh’s group became politely rowdy as they realized what the play was about. “There was much whispering and giggling back and forth down our row,” he said, “as real names or easily decipherable noms de plume came sailing across the footlights.”

The Wassersteins showed up in full force
—
not just the adults, but Wendy’s two oldest nieces: Tajlei, age ten, and Jenifer, one week away from her eighth birthday.

None of them was prepared for what they were about to see.

At the end of the play, Jenifer looked sadly at her mother. “Wendy’s really unhappy, isn’t she?” the little girl observed.

For Georgette the play took a raw turn when Holly, the Wendy character, puts a melancholy song on the record player (James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain”) and pulls an old raccoon coat over her head while she lies on her bed, smoking. Holly telephones a young doctor she met briefly in a museum and proceeds to deliver a prolonged, unfiltered catalog of her insecurities and deficiencies. With wit and poignancy, the monologue strips the character—an intelligent, searching young woman—to her painful, unformed essence.

First Georgette recognized the coat—it was Wendy’s—and then came to a realization about her sister. “She revealed so much of herself, she went so deep, that I felt uncomfortable,” said Georgette. “I didn’t know that part of Wendy.”

Lola and Morris stood and clapped for their daughter, but Lola was not altogether happy. She was proud of seeing Wendy’s name in the newspaper, but she wasn’t thrilled to sit next to her granddaughters watching a frank discussion of diaphragms and sex. Shortly afterward Lola said to Tajlei, “Ah, sweetheart, the girls in the dance class were talking about Wendy’s play.” Her tone indicated that she liked the attention but was embarrassed to have a daughter who used dirty words in public.

Pride prevailed. It wasn’t unusual to find Lola standing outside the Phoenix accosting people as they left the theater. “So did you like the show?” she asked. “The playwright’s my daughter, you know.”

Just as
Uncommon Women and Others
had revealed hidden truths and suppositions about Wendy’s friends, the play exposed aspects of Wendy she tried to conceal. Beneath the giggles and lowered head lay a questioning, rebellious soul. In addition to the empathy, sincerity, and uncertainty she radiated, Wendy Wasserstein was filled with angry frustration at society’s expectations and life’s vagaries. She wanted to be heard.

And she was.

“Dramatic Wit and Wisdom Unite in ‘Uncommon Women and Others’ ” was the headline on Richard Eder’s review in the
Times.

Eder, who had become the paper’s chief critic just a few months earlier, praised the “inventive direction” and “splendid acting,” elaborating with specific instances of memorable portrayals, offering special plaudits for Jill Eikenberry, Swoosie Kurtz, and Alma Cuervo. He admired the peek into a woman’s world but was also somewhat offended by the vulgarity. He ended the review on a note of disapproval, wagging an editorial finger at the unladylike language and offering a veiled warning to the playwright, as though telling her not to get an overinflated sense of her own importance, to be careful with her talents.

“Uncommon Women” contains enough specific sex talk to cover the walls of every women’s lavatory in the World Trade Center. It is believable, sometimes funny and sometimes touching, but it becomes excessive. One has only to imagine this to be a play about men to realize just how excessive.

T
hree weeks after her twenty-seventh birthday, Wendy Wasserstein became a public entity. Less than a year had passed since she wrote to Ruth Karl in frustration, speculating on whether she should make yet another attempt at applying to law school. Now her play was the subject of lively and largely favorable discussion in the
New York Times
—and the
Daily News
and the
New York Post.
Soon followed more positive notices in
New York
magazine (where the notoriously tough, even cruel, John Simon offered high praise) and the
New Yorker
(from Edith Oliver, already a fan of Wendy’s from the O’Neill).

There was criticism focused on the play’s lack of structure, questions of substance, vagueness of time and space. But the general tenor, even the objections, conveyed the sense that this was a playwright to be reckoned with.

Uncommon Women and Others
was getting attention everywhere that mattered, but the praise didn’t translate into making a living. The run at the Phoenix couldn’t be extended past December 4, no matter that the reviews attracted sellout audiences. The theater was already committed to the next new playwright’s work. Not-for-profit theater was just that: no money. Wendy had been paid fifteen hundred dollars for her weeks of work, same as Steve Robman. This was Off-Broadway; it was possible to be a one-play wonder.

Still, despite all that, there was no denying the thrill of this moment in the sun.

W
ithin weeks, Thirteen/WNET in New York picked up the play for its series
Great Performances: Theater in America,
which meant national exposure on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS). The producers approached the Mount Holyoke administration about providing some props and then helping to publicize the broadcast:

January 12, 1978

Memorandum

Subject: Production of “Uncommon Women and Others” on Public Television in June

To: David B. Truman (president, Mount Holyoke College)

From: Irma L. Rabbino (director, public relations, MHC)

I have just had a conversation with Phyllis Geller, producer at WNET in New York, who will be producing the play by Wendy Wasserstein ’71, on the public television network in June. The play, “Uncommon Women and Others” will be produced by Theatre in America. . . .

As you know, I saw the play in New York, and although my reaction may have been intensified by the seating arrangements—I sat between my mother and father—I did find that some of the explicit sexual references, descriptions, gestures and language, left me with some deep concerns about what the play did for Mount Holyoke.

Mount Holyoke is very clearly the college . . . we are caricatured e.g. napkin folding was an important skill to be learned in the late ’60s. We are stereotyped. . . . But this kind of thing has been done before to all of “the seven” and we have seen it less skillfully portrayed on our stage in many a Junior Show.

Phyllis Geller tells me that they have taken out the four letter words and “overt obscenity” and any “gratuitiously pornographic discussions” but have left in most of the “graphic sexual things.” “We’re not discussing anything that isn’t frequently discussed on talk shows,” she said, “and if Dinah Shore can say it, why can’t a dramatist?”

I told her about the problems that I had with some of the language, and that I was concerned about the potential embarrassment to one of our faculty members. She will discuss this with Wendy Wasserstein.

Jim Cavanaugh has seen the play and thinks it’s terrific, as did the group of Wendy’s contemporaries with whom he saw it.

The play certainly helps to dispel our image as “a small Catholic college somewhere” or as “a convent,” and although it seems to hit most other sexual concerns and activities, it does not mention the lesbian issue.

We have also gotten miles of coverage in publications we do not normally appear in, e.g., the New Yorker, Time magazine, New York magazine, the Associated Press wire service, Ms., etc.

The questions that arise relate to our “endorsement” of the play.

My feeling is that we should not supply our mailing list (although the directory is available for $3.00) and, whether we agree to lend a few pieces of furniture or not, insist that we receive no credit line on the screen. . . .

A
s the Mount Holyoke pooh-bahs contemplated how to capitalize on the PBS broadcast without alienating too many alumnae, the theater people confronted the realities of television. A codirector with video experience, Merrily Mossman, was brought in by PBS to work with Steve Robman, a novice at staging scenes in front of cameras. The producers ordered the playwright to cut all curse words—“fucking amazing” wouldn’t fly on television—and to remove certain sight gags, considered too daring for the mainstream viewer, like Holly pouring piles of spermicidal cream into a diaphragm. Wendy saved the message she found on her answering machine, from a PBS executive: “We’ve okayed the script, everything’s fine except for clitoral orgasms.”

There was also a last-minute cast change. Glenn Close couldn’t play Leilah; she was in Buffalo playing the female lead in
The Crucifer of Blood,
a Sherlock Holmes story that was headed for Broadway. Both Steve Robman and Wendy knew Meryl Streep from Yale and decided to ask her to fill in. Wendy made the call.

Streep hadn’t spent much time with Wendy at the drama school, except a brief time they’d shared on crew sewing costumes—not getting much done because Wendy kept making jokes with Chris Durang and Albert Innaurato. The hyperintuitive actress enjoyed being around Wendy but couldn’t get a grip on her. “To me she always seemed lonely, and the gayer her spirits and the more eager her smile, the lonelier she seemed,” Streep said.

Streep had already made an impression in the New York theater world; she had appeared onstage at Lincoln Center in Chekhov’s
The Cherry Orchard
and in
Measure for Measure
at Joe Papp’s Shakespeare Festival. She had received a Tony nomination for her work in Tennessee Williams’s
27 Wagons Full of Cotton.
Her movie career was just taking hold; the previous year she appeared briefly in
Julia,
which starred Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave, and had filmed
The Deer Hunter,
Michael Cimino’s epic Vietnam movie, scheduled for release later in 1978.

Personally, it was a difficult period for Streep. Her fiancé, the actor John Cazale, best known for his role as the doomed Fredo Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s
Godfather
series, was dying of bone cancer. (Cazale’s final film was
The Deer Hunter,
released nine months after his death on March 12, 1978.) But the PBS film would take just a few days, and though Leilah’s role was small, the character was opaque enough to be interesting. She agreed to take the part.

Streep’s participation became a significant component of the marketing of
Uncommon Women and Others.
In April, a month before the play was shown on PBS, the actress appeared in a leading role on national television, in the NBC miniseries
Holocaust.
(It received huge ratings and she won an Emmy. When the video of PBS’s
Uncommon Women
was released a year later, Streep’s picture appeared on the box.)

Even with all the cuts and changes, the PBS taping went smoothly. “Wendy seemed very happy during that shoot. She seemed to get a big kick out of the whole thing,” said Jennifer von Mayrhauser, the costume designer. When Wendy was alone, however, the old demons returned. Despite the huge wave of acclaim, she hadn’t yet convinced herself that she was Wendy Wasserstein, Promising Playwright. There was the dismissive review in
Time
magazine, which called her play “stereotypical” and suggested that the “well skilled” actresses “might be better employed.” The check she received from Avon Books for the book version of
Uncommon Women and Others
was equally deflating: For the U.S. and worldwide rights, she was paid $750.

Not long after the PBS taping but before the play was shown on television, she described how she was feeling in a letter to Ruth Karl, her Mount Holyoke friend:

My dearest Ruthie,

What a strange year this has been. I feel as if I’ve aged around 8 years and had no intention of doing that. It’s as if the girl who wrote
Uncommon Women
is different than the sort of average looking woman who is writing this letter. Well, some things are the same. As I sit here near Zaro’s Bread Basket (new bakery in Grand Central), chocolate chip cookies are dancing a tango with a Barton’s white chocolate rabbit possessing my anxiety and imagination with desire and guilt.

God I love to eat and smoke and I know it’s all about avoiding relationships and oneself and all this energy should be chanelled [sic] into something creative, useful, not to mention monetarily gainful but when I think of a chocolate Godiva egg it only brings a smile or a tinge of pleasure to me. Oh well.

I thought I would devote this year to becoming a “woman” whatever that is. You know a lovely person who writes, is understanding, lives in a house with flowers and a man who she respects and can make her laugh and they will have children and do good work and someone else will fill out the tax forms while she remains interesting and he stays kind and loving.

Well, these images have led me on a road to isolation and I suppose feeling as lost as I’ve ever been. . . .

Their friendship had been strained by
Uncommon Women.
Wendy had invited Ruth and her boyfriend to see the play, but when Ruth tried to get in touch to nail down details, Wendy became elusive. Ruth had the feeling Wendy didn’t want her to see the play.

Finally Wendy called Ruth and told her she’d arranged tickets for the Saturday matinee, the play’s final weekend. Ruth drove from the Berkshires with her boyfriend (who became her husband the following year). It was a difficult trip. They had just moved into a house together and had stopped to visit his parents in Connecticut on the way to New York. This was Ruth’s first visit to their house; everyone was apprehensive. On the way to New York, still feeling the tension, her boyfriend drove sloppily, and they almost had an accident.