Wendy and the Lost Boys (43 page)

In June 2003 Wendy was a resident artist at the MacDowell Colony outside Peterborough, New Hampshire; the lovely 450-acre retreat was the oldest residency program for artists in the United States; she stayed in the studio where Thornton Wilder wrote
Our Town.
She worked on her novel and polished the one-acts but didn’t get much done because she’d brought along Lucy Jane and a baby-sitter; they stayed in town while Wendy was at MacDowell. She tried to divide her time but found it hard to concentrate.

Michael Barakiva came to Peterborough as well. Barakiva, a Vassar graduate who had been Mark Brokaw’s assistant during
Old Money,
had become one of Wendy’s assistants. He worked with her on the libretto for
The Merry Widow,
which she adapted for a new production by the San Francisco Opera; the piece had been broadcast on PBS on Christmas Day 2002. Sometimes they would hole up together for hours in the writing studio she rented on Sixtieth Street in New York, going over edits and rewrites of whatever Wendy was writing.

“I felt I was apprenticing with a master,” he said. “I was her assistant. I was her typist. I was her researcher.”

He began to direct plays, and she came to see his work. One night, to celebrate a production, she took him to dinner to Lattanzi, a Theater Row restaurant known for its carciofi alla giudia, crispy fried artichokes Jewish-Italian style. He never forgot the taste of those artichokes—a treat for a struggling young director—but the evening was embedded in his memory because of the unexpected offer Wendy made that night: “I really enjoyed your work, and I’d like to work with you as a director sometime.”

He thought she was being nice, but she was serious. She asked him to direct the two one-acts—
Welcome to My Rash
and
Psyche in Love—
at the Kennedy Center festival at the end of the summer.

While they were in New Hampshire, the two of them went out to dinner at the Hancock Inn, a fifteen-minute drive from MacDowell. They began talking to their waiter, a good-looking, strapping young man, who told them his story. He said he’d been a student at Wesleyan and had been accused of plagiarism three times. He was certain the accusations arose because he was a wrestler and there was an anti-jock bias. But he assured them he knew how to write a good paper; he’d gone to boarding school at Andover.

When Barakiva and Wendy left the restaurant, she told the waiter, “Next time you get accused of plagiarism, tell the professor the feminist playwright Wendy Wasserstein believes you wrote the paper.”

He thanked her, but Barakiva could see that the waiter had no idea who she was. Outside, Wendy said to Barakiva, “There’s a play there.”

He responded, “Nah, we both just think he’s attractive. I don’t see it at all.”

Shortly after that, Wendy began writing a one-act play she called
Third;
one character is a young man named Woodson Bull III, modeled on the waiter they’d met that night. The other is a middle-aged feminist professor, who accuses him of plagiarism.

Barakiva mentioned to Wendy a life-altering class he’d taken on
King Lear
when he was at Vassar, taught by Ann E. Imbrie, a professor about Wendy’s age who had cancer. Wendy decided that the central argument between her two characters would focus on a paper the student writes about
King Lear.

“I’ve never seen somebody take, like, half an idea and then make a play out of it,” said Barakiva. “And now I can’t imagine that play being about anything but
King Lear.
She just saw that’s what it’s going to be about.”

When they returned home from MacDowell, they called Imbrie for thoughts on a radical feminist interpretation of
Lear
. From these discussions Wendy created an argument for her fictional professor, Laurie Jameson; shrewdly mocking academic feminism, she made Jameson the author of
Girls Will Be Boys: The Demasculinization of Tropes in Western Literature.
In the play Jameson declares that Cordelia, Lear’s beloved youngest daughter, isn’t the heroine of the play, but rather a victim. “What has been seen as the tragedy of Lear is actually the girlification of Cordelia,” Jameson declares.

The student accused of plagiarism eventually forces Jameson to rethink her didacticism while he acknowledges she has led him to rethink the meaning of
King Lear.
Through this conceit Wendy addressed the futility of her own real-life furies.

The professor in
Third
is consumed by “free-floating anxiety.” She tells her therapist, “I keep thinking about a James Taylor song I listened to when I was in college. The lyric went something like, ‘Guess my feet know where they want me to go, walking down a country road.’ I keep thinking about that country road, and I don’t know where the hell it goes. God, I hate the times we’re living in.”

By August a one-act version of
Third
was ready. That fall, in preparation for the workshop at Theater J, Wendy decided to ax
Psyche in Love.
Working with Barakiva, she folded some of the play’s passages into
Welcome to My Rash
and continued to develop
Third,
which was emerging as the stronger piece.

On December 15 there was another reading for Dan Sullivan at Lincoln Center of
Welcome to My Rash,
this time with
Third.
That reading clarified matters for the director. He decided that
Welcome to My Rash
didn’t carry enough weight to take it further.
Third,
on the other hand, had potential but would have to be expanded. “
Third
seemed to be incomplete as an idea and too large an idea for a one-act,” said Sullivan. “I suggested the idea of making it a full play.”

André was heartened by Sullivan’s response. He felt that Wendy, now a mature writer, was on the verge of expanding her range. “She was very involved in the world and of course her daughter’s life,” he said. “All of that would have renewed her. You could see her moral stature as an older person having gone through these midyears of unhappiness and anger and bitterness. Having a child, exasperating as it can be, renews you, and I feel her writing was beginning to be renewed.”

But her forward momentum was given yet another massive jolt. Two weeks after the Lincoln Center reading, on December 30, 2003, Gerry Gutierrez was found dead in his apartment at age fifty-three, a decade after surviving throat cancer. Cause of death: complications from the flu. The obituary in the
Washington Post
carried biographical details Gutierrez had once listed as a joke in a theatrical Who’s Who: “married Wendy J. Wasserstein (a writer), December 3, 1983 (divorced, December, 1986); children: Ginger Joy, Phyllis Kate, Edna Elizabeth.”

The “children” were Wendy’s cat and Gutierrez’s dogs.

At Gutierrez’s memorial service the following spring, Wendy spoke about his being in the delivery room the day Lucy Jane was born. “He will always live in my heart, whenever I look at my daughter and whenever I am in a theater,” she said.

The
Washington Post
obituary got it wrong, she said. “Gerry and I were never divorced. He will always be my husband.”

She returned to the theme of family. “I think Gerry made me and all of us here today part of his extended family,” she said. “Gerry created families in the theater.”

Welcome to My Rash
and
Third
were presented as a Theatre J workshop production in January 2004 and received encouraging reviews. “There is a sense of loss and a largeness of heart in these new works that show breathtaking maturity,” wrote the reviewer in the
Washington Times.

Michael Barakiva was singled out for directing “with delicacy and care.” Wendy returned from Washington determined to follow Dan Sullivan’s advice and expand
Third.
She had made it clear to Barakiva that if André wanted to produce the play at Lincoln Center, Dan Sullivan would replace her protégé as director.

Barakiva appreciated her directness. “I knew a twenty-seven-year old director is not going to direct Wendy Wasserstein’s premiere in New York,” he said. “The fact that I got to work on the plays at all—the experience and the knowledge for me—was invaluable, the defining moment of my directing career.”

For most of the next year, Wendy concentrated on expanding
Third
and working on her novel, though she managed to squeeze in a book review for the
Times,
to write the introduction to the American Ballet Theatre’s televised version of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
and to testify with Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Miller before the Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington on behalf of a bill meant to give playwrights more clout in negotiating contracts with producers. She and Bruce were honored at a fund-raising dinner at the Pierre Hotel for the Bank Street College of Education. She and Tony Kushner spoke about Jewish culture at the Jewish Community Center on the Upper West Side.

She tried to be attentive to Lucy Jane. When Lucy was four, they visited the set of
Sesame Street,
where they met the show’s executive producer, Lewis Bernstein, and discovered that he was married to Wendy’s old friend from yeshiva, Gaya Aranoff, now a physician. Shortly after that, they all met at a restaurant for dinner. Wendy asked Aranoff and Bernstein, who were observant Jews, if she could bring Lucy Jane to their home one Friday night for a “real” Sabbath dinner—one that wasn’t ordered in from Shun Lee.

About a year later, in 2004, Wendy and Lucy visited the Aranoff-Bernsteins in Riverdale. “Wendy was funny, telling us stories,” said Aranoff. “She wanted Lucy Jane to see the candles. We did kiddush, washing hands, the whole ritual with challah. I could tell that it touched her.”

Despite all this activity, Wendy was growing sicker, though she refused to acknowledge it. Bill Finn confronted her one evening when they were eating out together. “Something is wrong,” he told her. “We have to get you help, to take care of you.” She responded by leaving the restaurant, hailing a taxi, and going home.

“Where does he get off saying this?” she asked Rhoda, their mutual friend. After that, Rhoda trod softly when talking to Wendy about medical issues. She had accompanied Wendy to doctors’ appointments and listened to her friend downplay her symptoms. Wendy was an accomplished dramatist, able to convince her friends and even her doctors what she herself needed to believe: If she kept moving, she just might trick fate.

DIANNE WÏEST AND CHARLES DURNING STARRED IN
THIRD
, WENDY’S
FINAL PLAY, WHICH,
NEW YORK TIMES
CRITIC BEN BRANTLEY
SAID, “EXHALES A GENTLE BREATH OF AUTUMN, A RUEFUL
AWARENESS OF DEATH AND OF SEASONS PAST.”

Twenty-three

THE FINAL PRODUCTION

2005

In January 2005 Wendy and Chris Durang
agreed to be part of a symposium on humor sponsored by the Key West Literary Seminar. The seminar had become a popular boondoggle for writers, offering a warm retreat in the dead of winter from colder climates and from the persistent self-doubt and financial pressures that can overwhelm creative souls. In this balmy, laid-back atmosphere, writers were made to feel important and comfortable. There were many opportunities to mingle with one another in a no-compete zone, as well as to talk and perform before appreciative audiences. Key West had become more commercialized and gentrified over the years, but this haven for gay people, literary types, and assorted dropouts remained charming and tacky enough. Within these cozy confines, where people typically walked or rode their bikes as a form of transportation, the visiting writers could feel themselves to be heirs to the literary tradition of historic locals like Ernest Hemingway and Tennessee Williams.

Chris arrived a day before Wendy, in time for the opening ceremonies and receptions. Except for flecks of gray in his hair and a thickened middle, he still radiated a devilish sweetness, a boyish apprehension. He felt insecure about their panel for many reasons. The lineup had changed; Terrence McNally, who had a house in Key West, was supposed to be part of the discussion with him and Wendy, but McNally had canceled at the last minute. Chris worried that the audience would know Wendy, from either her plays or essays or television appearances, but wouldn’t know him. They were the only playwrights; this wasn’t a theater crowd.

More worries: Chris had checked out talks by Billy Collins, the former poet laureate of the United States; Roy Blount Jr., the southern novelist; and Calvin Trillin, the popular
New Yorker
writer. All of them had given great performances. Chris decided he and Wendy should prepare something entertaining, so they wouldn’t end up answering tedious questions like, “What’s the difference between humor in theater and in books or movies?”

She was flying in late that evening with five-year-old Lucy Jane and Emmy, the nanny, so they just talked briefly, long enough to agree they shouldn’t wing it. They would meet in the morning to work out the details.

Wendy was staying with Lucy Jane and Emmy at the Paradise Inn, in a snug bungalow tucked among flowering jasmine and red ginger. The next morning, while Chris waited for Wendy to get ready, he sat on a couch outside, on a screened-in porch, uncertain about what it would be like to see her. The Bell’s palsy got better and worse, but it never fully disappeared.

When Wendy greeted him that morning in Key West he was relieved. Her face wasn’t quite the face of Wendy the “vicious dumpling”—the smile was slightly off—but she looked good. She seemed happy as she plopped down next to him on the couch. Lucy joined them a few minutes later. The tiny baby had grown into a normal-size girl, slender and fair.

Chris didn’t see Lucy that often, so she was a bit shy, sitting on the other side of Wendy. She kept peeking at Chris, and eventually they made eye contact. He waved. She waved back, and they both smiled. He was happy they’d connected and looked forward to building a real relationship with Wendy’s little girl. It was a nice moment, there on the couch, and it occurred to Chris that this was the first time in years he’d seen Wendy just being relaxed. Usually she was running from thing to thing.

The entire day brought back warm memories of earlier, happier times. They left Emmy and Lucy at the bungalow and went to a nearby diner, to work on their presentation. That, too, was fun, reminding him of their earlier collaborations; the last one was in 1994, when they wrote a comedy sketch based on the Greek tragedy
Medea
for the twenty-fifth-anniversary celebration of Juilliard’s drama division. While they ate eggs, Chris suggested they read from their crackpot
Medea
at the symposium.

When they went back to her bungalow so Wendy could change clothes, he noticed—with relief—that she was walking normally. They had a pleasant walk along funky, vulgar Duval Street to the San Carlos Institute, the elegant historic building where the panels took place. Only when they walked up the stairs to the stage did she need steadying. He barely noticed; she made no fuss about it.

The organizers of the literary seminar taped the sessions. Even on the recording, the connection between audience and speakers is palpable. Wendy and Chris were in top form. They read their version of
Medea,
about a scorned wife seeking to exact revenge on her philandering husband, with Wendy as Medea and Chris as everyone else. First Wendy set the stage, making the classic approachable.

“How many of you in the audience have ever acted in Greek tragedy? How many of your lives are Greek tragedy?” Her voice was deep, warm, and filled with humor.

In their slapstick version, Jason’s mistress is “Dreaded Debbie, debutante from hell.” Jason rebukes Medea by telling her he’s keeping the children and enrolling them in the Dalton School (the Manhattan private school attended by Bruce Wasserstein’s older three children). Giggling, they reached the finale, where a deus ex machina intervenes, to the tune of “Camptown Races.”

As the laughter subsided, Wendy connected Medea to her own mother, Lola, about whom, she said, she was writing a play. “When Chris first met my mother, she came dressed as Patty Hearst,” she said. “She had on a little beret and a little toy gun, and she said, ‘Guess who I am?’ ” She read from an essay she’d written about her mother, and then, with a perfect comic pause, she grinned at the audience. “My mother and I go way back. . . .”

More laughter. She had worked her magic. The audience didn’t seem to see a dumpy woman in her fifties with messy hair and a face that had not borne time well. They were caught up in her playfulness, her ability to turn Greek tragedy into a Jewish-mother joke, making it personal and plausible.

Chris was on another panel that evening. Afterward he went to his hotel, too tired to attend yet another champagne reception. He saw Wendy again the following morning, when she read from
Shiksa Goddess,
her collection of essays. After she was finished, he walked her outside, where a car was waiting to take her to her next appointment. She left for New York a few hours later.

Those few days in Key West were a respite from familial, social, and professional demands. Like Chris, Emmy noticed how unusually relaxed Wendy was. She strolled the quaint streets with Emmy and Lucy, all of them delighted by the chickens that ran wild everywhere. While Wendy worked at the seminar, Emmy and Lucy took an open-air bus tour of the island. Wendy brought them to see Terrence McNally’s house. He wasn’t there, but his housekeeper showed them around. Terrence was one of Lucy’s favorite grown-up friends. Many people had wondered if he was her father, but people were always guessing who Lucy’s father was, and Wendy encouraged the game.

A
month later this item was reported in David Patrick Columbia’s Web gossip column, “New York Social Diary”:

Feb 16, 2005.
Leaving “21,” it was impossible to get a cab, so I caught a Fifth Avenue bus down to 23rd Street
where I picked up a cab who took me over to costume designer
William Ivey Long
’s newly restored and refurbished house over by Ninth Avenue in Chelsea. William was giving a book party for his close friend
Wendy Wasserstein
, the playwright who has just published a book for Oxford University Press called
Sloth.
One of the Seven Deadly Sins, if you didn’t know—Oxford has published a book by different authors on each one of them. Ms. Wasserstein was assigned the subject, and, as you might imagine, she has a distinctive and get-down take on the subject. To whit [
sic
]—chapter one is called “The Sloth Plan” and begins thusly:

Everyone who holds this book in hand has at some time made a New Year’s resolution to get off the couch and join a gym. People like Jack LaLanne and Arnold Schwarzenegger have made fortunes making every single reader of this book think there is something wrong with his or her horizontal instincts. Instead of eating cold pizza and beer for breakfast, we have all been led to believe we’ d be better off lifting one- and two-hundred pound slabs of iron in rotation. Have you ever been to a penal colony? That’s what insane criminals are forced to do.

About Long’s house the gossip columnist gushed:

The top floors were recreated from scratch, including the bathrooms, although it’s hard to believe because it looks and is furnished so authentically mid-Victorian you practically expect
Robert Louis Stevenson
to emerge from one of the rooms. . . . I saw Terrence McNally and Anna Sui and Betsy and Clifford Ross, Heather Watts, Caroline Kennedy and Ed Schlossberg, Paul Rudnick, Bruce and Claude Wasserstein, Susan Stroman, Frank Rich, Miko [
sic
] Kakutani, André Bishop, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff, Sonny Mehta, Cathy and Stephen Graham, Carrie Minot, and Rafael Yglesias and dozens more just like them (William’s friends are all William’s fans).

It all sounds fabulous until the accompanying photographs are deconstructed. There’s Wendy, standing next to Betsy Ross, her friend the fashion specialist. In the photograph Wendy’s right eye is closed and her smile weirdly frozen, a frank record of the recurrence of Bell’s palsy. Her sweater is askew; it might be Chanel, but brand-conscious Wendy never lost her habit of making expensive clothes look like someone else’s castoffs.

Her friendship with William Ivey Long had resumed officially in 2001, when
Shiksa Goddess
was published. William threw that book party, too. Ken Cassillo remembered going to the
Shiksa Goddess
party with butterflies in his stomach, thinking, “This is going to be a toxic event.” Instead it was just like old times. After all the celebrated friends left that night, Cassillo, Angela Trento, and Cindy Tolan remained with Wendy and William, drinking wine and laughing.

“It was very vivid in my mind, because after all the guests had gone, the rest of us were all flopped out casually on one of Williams’s sofas/lounges, and it was one of those special and surreal events that happen only in the company of Wendy and that William could pull off with such class and style,” he said. “It was truly a special evening, so I believe that whatever needed to be said was said and William and Wendy had made peace with one another.”

Wendy and William revived plans to start a company that would produce everything from lingerie to plays. They had incorporated Wasserstein Ivey Long Productions, LLC in 1998—before Lucy was born—to design a line of women’s evening wear and lingerie. Now they proceeded with the collection, called “Evening into Overnight.” Their launch during February 2002 Fashion Week made the cover of
Women’s Wear Daily;
Wendy wrote a script and lyrics for the event. That coproduction didn’t bear fruit either; they hadn’t worked out the details from design to manufacture.

In March, Wendy went to Dartmouth College, where she’d been chosen to be the 2005 Montgomery Fellow, part of an endowment established to bring “distinguished persons” to campus to teach, lecture, and meet with students and faculty. They came from various disciplines and had included several Nobel Prize–winners, among them the novelist Saul Bellow and Óscar Arias Sánchez, once and future president of Costa Rica.

Wendy was determined not to miss the opportunity, no matter how sick she was feeling. Dartmouth’s Sanborn Library had become a favored writing refuge over the years, a throwback to her Mount Holyoke days, with its chandeliers and overstuffed armchairs, ancestral portraits hanging on wood-paneled walls, and four-o’clock teatime. At Mount Holyoke, when Wendy had felt like an outcast, a Jew among gentiles, she ridiculed exactly this kind of Anglophile gentility. Over time she had become an Anglophile herself, and the library’s clubby interior appealed to that.

Peter Parnell—her playwriting buddy from the O’Neill, who became part of the Playwrights Horizons/Orphans’ Christmas group—was her link to Dartmouth. He was a graduate of the school and often returned there to write. Wendy had begun joining him there in the 1980s; they would show each other drafts of works in progress. In 1989, when Peter began teaching a playwriting course at the school, Wendy began visiting Dartmouth more frequently.

She liked to stay at the Hanover Inn, a century-old piece of Americana, in a room overlooking the sprawling Dartmouth green. She and Peter would stay in their rooms and write, then meet for a walk around Occom Pond. Though Wendy was quintessentially urban, she took respite in the New England landscape. As the child of immigrants, she was particularly attracted to people and places with deep American roots.