Wendy Wasserstein, Chronicler of Women's Identity Crisis Dies

The New York Times

By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

Published: January 30, 2006

Wendy Wasserstein, who spoke for a generation of smart, driven but sometimes unsatisfied women in a series of popular plays that included the long-running Pulitzer Prize winner "The Heidi Chronicles," died today after a bout with lymphoma, Lincoln Center Theater announced. She was 55.

Starting in 1977 with her breakthrough work "Uncommon Women and Others," Ms. Wasserstein's plays struck a profound chord with women struggling to reconcile a desire for romance and companionship, drummed into the baby boom generation by the seductive fantasies circulated by Hollywood movies, with the need for intellectual independence and a sense of achievement separate from the personal sphere.

Her heroines — intelligent and successful but also riddled with self-doubt — sought enduring love a little ambivalently, but they did not always find it, and their hard-earned sense of self-worth was often shadowed by the frustrating knowledge that American women's lives continued to be measured by their success at capturing the right man.

Ms. Wasserstein drew on her own experience as a smart, well-educated, funny Manhattanite who was not particularly lucky in romance to create heroines in a similar mold, women who embraced the essential tenets of the feminist movement but did not have the stomach for stridency.

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