Wendy Wasserstein (1950–2006) was an American playwright, screenwriter, and essayist. Her plays provide opportunities to study friendship, family, work, social expectations, and the ways people describe their choices to one another. She was born in Brooklyn, New York, and graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1971. Her The Heidi Chronicles won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Major works
You can begin with Uncommon Women and Others, produced off-Broadway in 1977, which concerns a reunion of Mount Holyoke graduates. Other plays include The Sisters Rosensweig, An American Daughter, Old Money, and Third. Mount Holyoke also identifies her screenplay for The Object of My Affection and the essay collection Shiksa Goddess: Or, How I Spent My Forties. These titles show several forms of writing; they should not all be cataloged as plays.
You can trace time differently in The Heidi Chronicles, which the licensor describes as following Heidi Holland from high school in the 1960s into a career as an art historian more than twenty years later. The Sisters Rosensweig brings three Brooklyn-born Jewish sisters together and places their different lives in relation to one another. The latter premiered at Lincoln Center Theater in 1992 and transferred to Broadway in 1993.
For actors: These structures invite you to examine change across time and the persistence of old relationships. A reunion is especially useful because the people present may have incompatible memories of who they were together. The practical question is what each person needs from the others during this encounter.
For your reading and rehearsal, consider these interpretations alongside the complete play.
Time changes what an old joke means
What happens when you meet somebody who remembers an earlier version of you? Wasserstein's reunions and family encounters offer a specific acting problem. You have your present circumstances, and the person facing you may still speak to a role you once occupied. A familiar joke can restore closeness, fix you in place or expose the distance between your lives. You need the shared history and the immediate reason for using it.
The Heidi Chronicles makes changes across time part of its dramatic structure. You can study each encounter within the possibilities available at that moment. An early ambition is still an ambition when you play it; it has not yet become your later interpretation of what went wrong or right. That discipline helps you make a long character development legible without carrying the ending through every scene.
You can also read Wasserstein across stage and screen. Her work includes the screenplay for The Object of My Affection alongside her plays and essays. The forms place different demands on the handling of conversation and social detail. In your own preparation, identify what is spoken, what can be observed and what the audience learns through the arrangement of scenes. Then bring the particular encounter into focus. A broad subject such as achievement or belonging becomes dramatically useful when you know whose recognition you need, what recognition would mean and what it costs to ask for it. That is where your research into a generation or social world can enter the performance.
Rehearsal questions
Try these independent study prompts with your chosen play.
For your scene in The Heidi Chronicles, identify the date and circumstances before making an interpretive choice. What has the character experienced by this moment, and what has not happened yet? Make a timeline using the script’s evidence. Play an early scene without borrowing the character’s later knowledge or imposing an ending on every exchange.
For your encounter between sisters or old friends, record one immediate objective for each person. Then identify what their shared history makes easier and what it makes more difficult. Does a familiar joke invite closeness, preserve status, interrupt a difficult subject, or test an alliance? Allow the particular scene to answer; the same joke need not perform the same function every time.
In your second rehearsal pass, choose one moment when the speaker believes the listener understands, then discovers that the listener does not. Observe how the effort to repair that misunderstanding affects tempo, emphasis, and attention. This is a way to investigate comic timing through a relationship rather than deciding in advance where a laugh should happen.
When your character discusses achievement, marriage, friendship, or belonging, distinguish the character’s own measure of a good life from the measures imposed by other people. Try to understand each position without turning the scene into a verdict delivered by the actor.
Interpreting the work
You can approach these characters without expecting one representative “woman’s experience.” Attend to the character’s generation, class, religion, education, and particular relationships where the text gives evidence. Biographical parallels can guide research, but they do not make every heroine a transcript of Wasserstein’s life.
Related reading
Objective, obstacle, and beat for shifting encounters; craft for relating research, chronology, and performance choices.
Source for further study: Mount Holyoke’s profile of Wendy Wasserstein.