Wendy and the Lost Boys (18 page)

As she expanded the play from its earlier incarnation, Wendy incorporated new details gleaned from her friends’ lives. Harriet Sachs, her friend from Canada, had become a lawyer (like the character Kate) and was in a married-like relationship with her boyfriend, another lawyer, though they agreed they didn’t want to marry. Mary Jane Patrone (Muffet)—to Wendy’s surprise—hadn’t settled down with a man and was working in the promotions department at the
Boston Globe.
Ruth Karl (Rita) had moved in with her boyfriend and was living in the Berkshires, where she continued to assess her possibilities and the meaning of life.

The workshop took place on March 19 and 20. The readings went well; the audiences were enthusiastic. André continued Bob Moss’s practice of explaining the mission of Playwrights Horizons at every performance, hoping to raise money, and did so on those evenings. As the room emptied, after one of the
Uncommon Women
workshops, he met Wendy’s family. Morris Wasserstein, perplexed as to why the nice Harvard graduate was stuck in a theater next to a massage parlor, went up to André and put an arm on the young man’s shoulder. He was muttering “tsk, tsk, tsk” as he withdrew his wallet and proceeded to take out everything in it, more than fifty dollars, a significant sum for Playwrights at the time.

“André,” he said, “if you want to continue a life in this not-for-profit theater business, you’re going to need a lot more of this.”

André appreciated the donation but was far more moved by the spontaneous kindness of the gesture.

On May 3, 1977, Wendy received a letter from Lloyd Richards, artistic director of the O’Neill, telling her the play was accepted, chosen from more than eight hundred submissions, for the National Playwrights Conference taking place in Waterford, Connecticut, between July 10 and August 7.

André was excited when he heard the news—for her but also for himself. He thought
Uncommon Women
could help launch his career as literary manager at Playwrights Horizons. Having the play chosen for the O’Neill confirmed his judgment and would make their production in the fall more momentous. Significant producers went searching for material at the O’Neill, and André already had laid claim to this one. Or so he believed.

WENDY’S SUMMER AT THE EUGENE O’NEILL THEATER CENTER CHANGED EVERYTHING.

Nine

TRYOUT TOWN, USA

Summer 1977

The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center
had theatrical romanticism built into its foundation. Eugene O’Neill—the great American depressive, playwright, author, and Nobel laureate—used to spend summers in New London, Connecticut. When O’Neill was twenty-six, he wrote a poem for his girlfriend, titled “Upon Our Beach,” referring to the secluded cove in nearby Waterford, where the playwright regularly trespassed. This beloved stretch of beach belonged to a local railroad tycoon, Edward Crowninshield Hammond, who chased O’Neill and his girlfriend off his property. O’Neill took his revenge as writers do, by modeling characters—the wealthy sluggards in
A Moon for the Misbegotten
and
Long Day’s Journey into Night
—in part on Hammond.

The Hammond farm was bought by the town of Waterford in 1961, eight years after O’Neill’s death. Town officials had plans to turn the estate into a park and to destroy the property’s buildings, including the rambling house and the large old barn. George C. White, a Yale School of Drama graduate, had grown up in Waterford. When he heard of his hometown’s plans, he conceived of the idea—with other graduates from Yale Drama—of a nonprofit center aimed at developing American theater outside the Broadway establishment. It was the same impulse that had motivated Joe Papp, and which led Edward Albee to begin his Playwrights Unit, where Bob Moss got his start developing new plays.

In 1965 the National Playwrights Conference at the O’Neill was established. The O’Neill Center quickly became a place for new playwrights to rail against the theatrical establishment, in an idyllic setting paid for largely by the establishment, including major grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and then the Ford Foundation. Soon producers, from both Broadway and Off-Broadway, were prowling the grounds looking for talent. In 1967 the
New York Times
deemed Waterford, Connecticut, “Tryout Town, USA.”

In 1968 White asked Lloyd Richards, who had worked as a director at the conference, to take over as artistic director. Under Richards’s leadership, the O’Neill tried to balance the founders’ desire to develop new works free of commercial pressure with the playwrights’ need to make a living. The compromise, as White put it: “Producers and agents continued to be welcome at Waterford, but rigorous efforts were made to keep negotiations off the grounds.”

These rules were still in place almost a decade later, when Wendy arrived at the O’Neill. The focus was on the playwrights. Each play was assigned actors plus a director and a dramaturge, a literary adviser who acted as a mediator between the directors and the writers. That summer there were sixteen plays divided among four dramaturges and four directors.

Wendy thrived on both the work and the summer-camp ambience at the O’Neill, located on ninety acres sloping down to Long Island Sound. Meetings took place underneath picturesque copper beech trees and on the beach. The actors and playwrights lived off the premises at Connecticut College a few miles away, in a bare-bones dorm designated “The Slammer.” They were transported from their “prison” by buses to the O’Neill, where they took all their meals, cafeteria style, in the big house they called “The Mansion.”

Wendy became the resident social butterfly. She took it as her duty to provide comic relief, in surroundings that were both magical and fraught. The creative spirits gathered at the O’Neill understood that while they might be soul mates in that shimmering enclave on Long Island Sound, once they stepped outside the O’Neill they would be competitors in the fractious domain of the show-business professional.

The injection of nervous tension into the bucolic landscape created an atmosphere conducive to late-night talks and personal revelation. They discussed their anxieties. There were flirtations and romances, gay and straight. Some crossed over, leaving wives for boyfriends.

Peter Parnell was also workshopping a play at O’Neill that summer. He was twenty-three years old and, like Wendy, was consumed with selfexamination. Like Chris Durang, he was gay and an only child. Parnell soon felt that his relationship with Wendy had a familial quality, as though they were sister and brother. Parnell would become part of Wendy’s growing cast of confidants and colleagues who would remain friends as their lives changed.

T
he O’Neill clarified what Wendy already knew: She had no intention of settling down with Douglas Altabef, even though he understandably believed that their relationship had been moving in that direction. He took Wendy to the bris of his older brother’s son and to the party for his parents’ thirty-fifth anniversary. After he graduated from law school in June, he returned to New York from Cambridge; he had a job with a prestigious law firm (Stroock & Stroock & Lavan) lined up for the fall. Though he and Wendy weren’t officially living together, he had essentially moved into her apartment. They discussed getting a place together in Brooklyn, where the rents were more reasonable for more space.

While he looked through the real-estate ads, she agonized. There were many factors at play, but the proximate cause of her final, internal estrangement may have been a roast chicken.

Aimee Garn, a friend of Wendy’s who had studied design at the Yale University School of Art while Wendy was a drama-school student, was going to the theater with Wendy and Doug one evening. He told Wendy he’d rather eat at home than go out to dinner. Could she cook a chicken?

The question upset Wendy. It wasn’t that she didn’t know how to cook a chicken.

The chicken symbolized the dilemma she delineated starkly: Would she become part of the theater world or would she become a homebody?

“Wendy’s drive was to be visible, to be connected with important people and included in the social scene,” Aimee said. “I think Wendy saw the whole picture then—that she was choosing between the domestic plans of Doug and the theater and social worlds.”

The roast chicken would become the centerpiece of a scene in
Isn’t It Romantic.
In this fast-paced bit of slapstick, Janie Blumberg, the Wendy character, contends with her boyfriend Marty’s desire to have her cook a chicken instead of ordering in.

In the play the chicken represents Janie’s indecision, her insecurity, her inability to be honest with Marty—deep, troubling questions, but it’s hard to take them
too
seriously when they revolve around a chicken dinner. Still, at the end of the scene, there is undeniable poignancy when Janie cradles the chicken according to Wendy’s stage directions: “like a baby.”

In real time, summer of 1977, Doug wasn’t aware of the tsunami of angst unleashed by his request for a roasted chicken. He wasn’t aware of much of anything apart from the vast assemblage of legal data he was memorizing in order to become a member of the New York State Bar Association. When Wendy left for the O’Neill, he barely noticed. He remained in her apartment, immersed in studying for the law boards, oblivious to anything else.

Doug missed the production of Wendy’s play because of the bar exam but then went to visit her at the O’Neill, still in a fog from his ordeal. They planned a trip to London for later that summer. Doug told Wendy he’d found a terrific apartment—a huge duplex with a garden—for them in Cobble Hill, a quiet residential Brooklyn neighborhood where rents were cheap. He took her lack of a response as an affirmative, and when he returned to New York, he signed a lease for occupancy in the fall.

He didn’t realize that Wendy’s summer at the O’Neill marked a turning point in her career and in their romance.

W
endy’s play was one of four that Swoosie Kurtz had been assigned to act in at the O’Neill. When she began reading
Uncommon Women and Others
by Wendy Wasserstein, she was stopped by a line her character—Rita, based on Ruth Karl—was supposed to say.

I’ve tasted my menstrual blood.

Kurtz was surprised by her own squeamishness. She was thirty-two years old and was accustomed to exploring the dark realms of human consciousness at the O’Neill, where she had first begun spending part of her summer four years earlier. Death was a frequent subject for the playwrights invited to test and refine new works. Menstruation was not. Men were encouraged to ponder the emotional trauma they might have endured as masturbating youths or homosexual adults. But women were supposed to keep their hormonal imbalances and vaginal business to themselves. Until 1972, just five years before Swoosie Kurtz confronted Rita’s line about menstrual blood, the National Association of Broadcasters had forbidden the advertising of women’s sanitary products on television or radio.

Kurtz’s hesitation was momentary.

“The part just went, boom! Off the page. I knew I could soar with this, I could fly,” she said. “The play said things to me about women that I’d never thought of.”

Kurtz was a military brat who had always felt more comfortable around boys. “I sort of mistrusted women because they gossiped, maybe they had ulterior motives,” she said. “I felt with guys, even in grammar school, they were more direct, they said what they mean, you knew where you stand with a boy.”

Uncommon Women and Others
forced her to think about her attitudes and relationships toward women and female friendship. Having moved around so much, she’d become accustomed to being a loner. She was a reclusive, private person who had never been part of a group like the one depicted in Wendy’s play. The Seven Sisters–college world of the characters was also alien to her—but the women’s relationships and insecurities felt familiar. She understood what Rita, her character, meant when she said, “I figure if I can make it to forty, I can be pretty fucking amazing.”

Kurtz had appeared on Broadway, but she was still waiting to be discovered. While she was tiny and could pass for a scrappy little gamine, she was in her thirties, geriatric for an ingenue. Her part in
Uncommon Women
had the potential, she hoped, to help her get noticed in a way she hadn’t been before.

It was customary at the O’Neill for the participants to gather for a critique the day after each play had its second performance. Everyone staggered outside after breakfast, clutching cups of coffee, to the rough-wood-and-bleachers setting they called the “instant theater,” just behind the back porch of the Mansion. The playwright, dramaturge, and director joined Lloyd Richards, artistic director of the O’Neill, on metal folding chairs on the small stage at the center and listened to comments from the other conference participants. Richards instructed the group to give honest feedback. Which characters did you identify with? What themes did you recognize? The dramaturges took notes, to review later with the playwright.

During the critique Marilyn Stasio—the dramaturge assigned to
Uncommon Women—
saw that Wendy’s play created the kind of stir that happened once or twice each season. “It was the hit of the summer,” she said. “It was a charmed show.”

Kathryn Grody, who played the role of Holly—the character modeled on Wendy—felt the buzz. “We felt we were the stars of the O’Neill that summer,” she said.

There were reservations. One man said at the critique that he thought it was peculiar that more men than women laughed at the show.

A woman director said she felt that the playwright trivialized female experience, though someone else disagreed. “We have to have farce as well as tragedy about women’s lives,” she said.

Honor Moore watched
Uncommon Women and Others
at one of the public performances. Just a few years older than Wendy and a Radcliffe graduate, Moore described her reaction in an article for the December 1977 issue of
Ms.
magazine, where the name Wendy Wasserstein first appeared in a national publication:

Seven young women, portraying students at Mount Holyoke in the sixties, dance to a bouncy calypso beat. It is strange at first and then moving to see these women—who throughout the play have been competing, waiting for phone calls from men, examining a first diaphragm, wisecracking (“I think all men should be forced to menstruate . . .”) and otherwise comically demonstrating white middle-class female paralysis—dancing together so happily. The playwright’s choice of dance tune—“If you want to be happy for the rest of your life / Never make a pretty woman your wife”—illuminates that contradiction with poignant irony. This and other moments in Wendy Wasserstein’s hilarious
Uncommon Women and Others
make me weep, not laugh.