Wendy and the Lost Boys (24 page)

Except for a zinger calling Janie’s parents “disappointingly clichéd,” the review was complimentary until paragraph eight. There Kerr tossed a dart directly into Wendy’s most sensitive spot, the place where Bob Brustein still lived, whispering that she was nothing more than a witty poseur.

“The one thing I’m not sure of is whether Miss Wasserstein is in any special sense a dramatist,” wrote Kerr. “An explorer, a researcher, a reflective observer, yes.” But a playwright? The review’s title indicates that the answer is no: “Does This Play Need a Stage?” He concluded with praise that felt like a slap. “It seems to me that Miss Wasserstein should think seriously about the future and about the particular literary form—whatever it may turn out to be—that is most congenial to her. She’s too good not to get to the other side.”

W
hile Steve Robman’s career as artistic director at the Phoenix was flailing, André Bishop was turning into the new golden boy of Off-Broadway.

Before he officially became artistic director, he had already begun creating a sensibility for Playwrights Horizons by picking plays that reflected his own. André liked plays that set off what he called an “unconscious click” in his brain. “It’s very personal,” he said. “Someone was once analyzing the plays I like, and said rather cruelly that I choose only plays whose lead characters are variations or projections or fantasies of myself. It may be true.”

Between 1980 and 1982, he produced a steady run of successful shows, by writers who were just becoming established. These included
Gemini
by Albert Innaurato,
Table Settings
by James Lapine,
Coming Attractions
by Ted Tally,
Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You
by Christopher Durang, and
March of the Falsettos
by William Finn (directed by James Lapine).

Many of the playwrights André produced were friends of Wendy’s, either people he’d met through her or had found in the places where talent gravitated, like the O’Neill. There was also a commonality of age (these playwrights, like André, were almost all in their thirties) and of background (there was a heavy, if not exclusive, bias toward the Ivy League).

“We were sort of a gang,” said Lapine, who became—along with Bill Finn—part of Wendy’s inner circle.

Because of Lapine’s connection there, Playwrights Horizons became the workshop venue for
Sunday in the Park with George,
by Broadway’s premiere composer-lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, collaborating with Lapine.

“Why am I working off Broadway?” Sondheim echoed a reporter’s question. “Basically, I wanted to write something with Jim Lapine. He’s associated with Playwrights Horizons, so naturally he wanted to do it there.”

As the Reagan era of deregulation and gentrification was beginning, Playwrights Horizons reflected not the ballyhooed 1960s political consciousness of Baby Boomers but the self-involvement that was emerging as a dominant characteristic. “Our ‘social concerns’ really have to do with the quality of our own lives,” said John Lyons, the theater’s casting director. “We tend to want to live well and we’re unhappy when we can’t. Sometimes I feel a twinge about that.”

Lyons further elaborated. “We’re after intelligence, verbal facility, so-phistication, freshness,” he said. “Many of us got into theater in the first place because we wanted some wit, style and, yes, glamour. Put it this way: If Noël Coward and Sam Shepard were both young playwrights submitting to this theater for the first time, we’d produce Coward.”

IN 1983
THE NEW YORK TIMES
ANOINTED PLAYWRIGHTS HORIZONS AS THE NEW STAR OF OFF OFF BROADWAY. [THE THEATER’S PLAYWRIGHTS, L TO R: JONATHAN REYNOLDS, CHRISTOPHER DURANG, JAMES LAPINE, TED TALLY, WENDY WASSERSTEIN, WILLIAM FINN, ALBERT INNAURATO]

André Bishop became a darling of the
New York Times,
no small matter for a producer building a reputation. In the summer of 1983, an article in the
New York Times Magazine
declared Playwrights Horizons “the most critically acclaimed Off Off Broadway group since Joseph Papp’s Public Theater began in 1967.” A year earlier André had been the subject of an admiring
Times
profile, under the heading “He Nurtures the Gifted Playwright.”

There he explained the common thread in the plays he produced. “I’m often drawn to work that is not all neatly tied up and beautifully structured,” he said. “I like plays that are lucidly framed, but within that frame, I’m drawn to writing that is unpredictable, that comes at you in strange ways, that astonishes you verbally by expressing strange thoughts.”

The reporter asked André what he thought “drove playwrights to continue at their often unrewarding craft.”

The answer belied a gentle soul. “My feelings about the world are so confused,” André said. “I don’t know why anybody does anything, much less sit alone in a room with pen and paper. I admire them, though. There’s a part of me that’s very much a loner. I mean, in my free time, I have a couple of friends, I have dinner with them, and I love to go out and see other plays. But basically when I have nothing to do, I come home and take bubble baths, and that’s pretty much it.”

Just as Wendy masked her ambition with giggles, André hid his beneath a shy, courtly manner. But when he wanted something, he could be relentless, and he wanted Playwrights Horizons to be noticed.

On December 26, 1982, Walter Kerr wrote an assessment of the past year, in which he drew up a list of the season’s ten theatrical achievements. He began with a eulogy for the Phoenix Theatre, which two weeks earlier had ceased operations after a run of thirty years.

Number five on the list was André Bishop.

“If you are a natural wonderer, and have begun to wonder why a group known as Playwrights Horizons should be proving so much more successful than any other Off Broadway house on 42d Street’s Theater Row, you will probably conclude that there’s a hidden achiever stashed away backstage somewhere, picking the play scripts and putting together the production units,” wrote Kerr. “Your conjecture will be entirely correct, and the name of the artistic director is André Bishop. . . . Hereafter the name should be writ large.”

W
endy, too, was working hard to advance her career. In April 1983 she won an eighteen-thousand-dollar playwright grant from the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. (She was one of 292 scholars, scientists, and artists chosen from 3,571 applicants.) She wrote a one-act play called
Tender Offer,
a slight, sweet story about a busy father who misses his daughter’s dance recital, for the Ensemble Studio Theatre’s annual festival of short plays. There were offers to write television and movie scripts.

Even before she read Walter Kerr’s advice about trying new literary forms, she had been considering her options. Three years before the Phoenix production of
Isn’t It Romantic,
she met with an editor at Atheneum Publishers, who followed up with an enthusiastic note: “Have you decided to try your hand at a novel yet? . . . I thoroughly enjoyed our meeting the other month.”

She hadn’t attempted a novel, but she had begun writing the journalistic essays that would become a significant aspect of her career. One of the first, a tongue-in-cheek piece called “The Itch to Hitch” (for which she was paid twenty-five hundred dollars) appeared in the November 1981 issue of
Mademoiselle
magazine. Peppered with skepticism, sarcasm, and longing, the essay begins:

I
f I were married, the following problems would be solved: loneliness, insecurity, the difficulty of meeting new people, the OPEC crisis and the real whereabouts of the lost ark of the covenant. Furthermore, I would no longer have $200 phone bills, bad plumbing, any friction with my mother or a compulsion to watch
Tomorrow Coast to Coast
even though I don’t really like it. If I were married, all my needs would be met by my husband. All my inadequacies would disappear.

For Wendy, now in her thirties, marriage loomed larger as a concern. She addresses her fears—and Lola’s—in
Isn’t It Romantic,
via Tasha, the character based on Wendy’s mother:

“Unfortunately, Janie, the clock has a funny habit of keeping on ticking,” Tasha tells her daughter. “I want to know who’s going to take care of you when we’re not around anymore.”

But Wendy may have identified more with Lillian—modeled after Aimee Garn’s mother, the publishing executive.

“When I was your age,” Lillian tells her daughter Harriet, who is twenty-nine, “I realized I had to make some choices. I had a promising career, a child, and a husband; and, believe me, if you have all three, and you’re very conscientious, you still have to choose your priorities. So I gave some serious thought to what was important to me. And what was important to me was a career I could be proud of and successfully bringing up a child. So the first thing that had to go was pleasing my husband, because he was a grown-up and could take care of himself.”

Wendy avoided the dilemma by specializing in impossible relationships with inaccessible men. As she began to revamp the play, the Firefly bond with André and Gerry grew stronger. “My husbands,” she called them, as Gerry became involved with Peter Evans, a talented and versatile young actor.
¹¹

Her friendship with Frank Rich had quickly evolved into a serious infatuation, though he was married and his older son had already been born. “My relationship with Wendy was very intense during my first marriage,” he said. “I was essentially not terribly happily married, and [my wife] Gail didn’t want to go to the theater. I had two friends, Rafe Yglesias [a novelist and screenwriter] and Wendy, with whom, together or separately, we went to the theater all the time. They became surrogate spouses.”

Rich understood that Wendy approached her role as surrogate spouse differently than Rafael Yglesias did. “She definitely had a crush on me, and I had sort of a crush on her,” he said. The critic and the playwright had much in common. Both were bright, charming, verbal Jews, driven to be exceptional, using the theatrical arena to do battle with childhood traumas as well as adult demands and desires.

She gave him her scripts to read, and he discussed plays with her. They delighted each other, exchanging gossip and piercing observations about their overlapping worlds. He had someone to endure awful productions with him, who could inject some fun into a dreary evening.

“At one long-forgotten fiasco, we returned from intermission to discover a ‘real’ swimming pool displayed on stage, with an invalid perched in a wheelchair at its edge,” he recalled. “Wendy turned to me with a conspiratorial grin. ‘Honey,’ she said in that husky tone that signaled a punch line was on the way, ‘by the end of this play that woman in the wheelchair will be in that pool.’ (We were not to be disappointed.)”

Many of Wendy’s theater friends disapproved of her relationship with the critic, though he recused himself from reviewing her work. Rich was doubly influential, as chief critic for the
Times
and as a Baby Boomer who paid special attention to the burgeoning voice of his peers. He was key to the resurgence of Off-Broadway, putting his stamp on what new theater should be. This made him friend and foe, builder and destroyer.

Chris Durang said to her, “How come you’re hanging out with Frank Rich?” It seemed odd to him. “I wasn’t used to playwrights hanging out with critics, and she just said she liked him, and I sort of accepted that,” he said.

Acceptance was not the same as liking, especially after Durang’s work didn’t fly with Wendy’s powerful theater companion. Wendy was caught in the middle when Rich skewered her friend, as he did when Durang’s screwball comedy
Beyond Therapy
opened on Broadway in the spring of 1982. The review began:

“Some day, I swear, the explosive comic brilliance of Christopher Durang will erupt on Broadway. The only question is when. It didn’t happen in 1978, when this playwright’s ‘A History of the American Film’ capsized in a spectacularly ill-conceived production. And it didn’t happen last night, when Mr. Durang’s latest play, ‘Beyond Therapy,’ pretty much wilted of its own volition at the Brooks Atkinson. But we must be patient with this gifted fellow—he’ll get there yet.”

Rich was aware via Wendy that Chris was angry at him. But it had always been clear to the journalist that while his friends could become hers, Wendy’s theater crowd was off-limits to him. “When I was theater critic, I wasn’t in touch with those people,” Rich said. “I’m sure she had to defend me right and left.” Their friendship was not secret, but it was separate.

With prominence came a kind of scrutiny Wendy didn’t like. Old friends like Aimee Garn noticed that she began to compartmentalize people rather than try to mesh her groups as she once had. “She was critical of others, often in a humorous way, but she was highly sensitive to other people’s reactions to her,” said Aimee. “She didn’t like to be gossiped about or to be called on inconsistencies. The way to avoid that was to keep everyone separate and not able to share information.”