"There's nothing wrong with being alone"

"What gives you the audacity to believe you've failed if you can't make life or stop death?
Because I was taught if I was a good girl and worked hard I could" - An American Daughter

Wendy Wasserstein died. I'd been hearing for a while about her cancer, but it's still a great loss. She was only 55.

Her New York Times Obituary calls her a "Chronicler of Women's Identity Crises," which I believe does her a disservice, though the article itself below the headline does a much better job of explaining exactly why and how she mattered so much. She was one of the few women playwrights who consistently, sucessfully had plays produced on Broadway. And she wrote strong roles for strong women. Isherwood describes her as a predecessor to Sex in the City, but she dealt with the lives of women who, though equally privileged, felt very real to me rather than fanciful romantic constructions of wealth and glamour. Female friendships, family relationships, feminist politics, and single motherhood suffused many of her plays. I regret thoroughly that I have never actually seen a production of one of Wasserstein's plays, but as an undergraduate in college I read them and fell in love with them.

I will honor her by reading one of her plays tonight, and I hope others will consider doing the same. She was a wonderful female voice in a theater that remains very much a boy's club, and she deserves recognition as a major American playwright. She won a Pulitzer Prize and wrote roles for which actresses like Lynn Thigpen won Tonys, but I never studied her in a drama class and only discovered her when assigned a scene from one of her plays in an acting class. She, like many other female playwrights, was marginalized and underestimated because she wrote about women. I hope now she will get the recognition she deserves for her bold theatrical discussions of gender in our society today.

UPDATE: Jill Dolan writes a beautiful post about the ambivalences surrounding Wasserstein's feminism of the priveledged. She calls her assimilationist and questions her for not being more critical, but raises the question of whether or not that's a bad thing. It's a beautiful reflection on memorializing someone about whose work you've been critical in the past.