By all accounts, Wendy Wasserstein was a wonderful person, a wonderful teacher, a wonderful advocate for the arts, and a wonderful friend. She also did wonderful things for women who wanted to see more women writing plays and performing in them.
So I can't tell you how much I wish that I thought her plays were just wonderful.
It feels churlish, ungenerous, and most of all unsisterly to say that I don't adore the work of this generally beloved woman, who died two years ago at 55 and whose final play, "Third," is now onstage at the Huntington Theatre Company. But one of the qualities I do admire about Wasserstein is her insistence on being true to ourselves, on finding our own paths instead of doing as we're told. And that's what makes me say it: Though they're full of funny moments, snappy lines, and pretty smart women, Wasserstein's plays are just not good enough to be great.
Before I say any more about that, though, I need to say something else: I wish I did not feel obliged to consider Wendy Wasserstein in the particular role of a "woman playwright." Not only do I think Wasserstein herself must have grown tired of carrying that particular banner, but also I wish there were so many famous, successful, frequently produced women playwrights that we could stop thinking about how remarkable it is that this one managed to write plays and get them staged, and just talk about the work.
Then, I think, we could all agree that Wasserstein wrote several amusing but not very deep plays, that she had an acute eye for the contradictions and confusions of American upper-class women's lives at the end of the 20th century, and that her plays struck a chord with many women of her generation (largely because they appreciated seeing themselves onstage) - but that most of the work is nevertheless unlikely to stand the test of time. I could say, fearlessly, that her gifts as a writer were notable but not large, I could keep "Uncommon Women and Others" and "The Heidi Chronicles" on a shelf somewhere between the collected works of Neil Simon and the "Sex and the City" box set, and that would be that.
In fact, however, I can't just say all that, even though I believe it. I can't say it because, unfortunately, we are still at a point in our cultural evolution when, by rejecting Wendy Wasserstein, I am at risk of seeming to reject the idea that women can be serious playwrights. (In this country alone, we have Paula Vogel, Suzan-Lori Parks, Sarah Ruhl, and a host of rising talents.) And, ironically enough, my wish about Wasserstein is exactly the kind of wish that all her women keep having - and keep knowing they won't see fulfilled.
What do Wasserstein's women want? From the conflicted Mount Holyoke senior Holly in "Uncommon Women" and the eponymous art history professor Heidi in "Chronicles" all the way through the battling "Sisters Rosensweig," the embattled political appointee Lyssa of "An American Daughter," and the battle-weary professor Laurie of "Third," what they want most of all, I think, is to be treated as human beings. This simple desire is the essence of Wasserstein's broad appeal to women of her generation: It sounds feminist enough to get her championed as a feminist playwright, but not so overtly political as to alienate women who are tired of arguing about what exactly feminism means.
It's also, of course, pretty blindingly obvious: Women are human beings. And yet the source of Wasserstein's frustration (and ours) is that for all its obviousness that idea still isn't taken for granted. So even if we can't agree with everything she ever said about what it means to be a female human being, we're happy that at least she kept talking about it.
And she kept talking about it the way women often do: chattily, lightly, deflecting impossible dilemmas with wry humor and a weary smile. This is at once a strength and a weakness of her plays. They sound like women talking about their lives, which is to say that they sound real, but they're more talk than action; for women who talk so much about all the things that women have to do, her characters don't do very much onstage.
They also, if you make the mistake of reading or seeing all the plays within a short time, start to sound far too much alike. Yes, occasionally one character is an East Coast WASP or a Midwestern overachiever or even a black Jewish oncologist in D.C. instead of a nice white Jewish girl from Manhattan, but all of them speak with one voice: smart, self-deprecating, insecure, and with an undercurrent of despair or fury that too rarely comes to the surface. They sound, in fact, very much as Wasserstein herself sounded in the essays and travel pieces and reminiscences (and one thinly imagined novel) that she wrote when she wasn't writing plays.
None of this is terrible. But it is small. Now, Chekhov's plays could look small on paper, too. But what elevates his characters' conversations into great theater is the ever-present hum of larger ideas and themes. Maybe they're just talking about cherry trees or wanting to go to Moscow, but Chekhov lets us hear the resonances of regret and longing and disappointed hope that evoke the whole culture of Russia in his time.
Wasserstein clearly wanted her characters' conversations to take on such resonance, and occasionally they do. Too often, though, they're too rambling and inconsequential, too baggily constructed, and too redundant to ring with that kind of concentrated clarity.
As a result, they stay trapped in the particulars of her characters' lives, rather than taking on a more universal significance. And even though scenes from my own life could fit nicely into a Wasserstein script - I was reading these plays while trying to amuse my 10-year-old, home sick from school, and talking with my editor on the phone about Wasserstein's thoughts on balancing work and family life - I think it's terribly limited, and limiting, to pretend that her plays have a lot to say about Woman Today.
They do have a lot to say about one kind of woman today: an educated, financially comfortable, liberal, now middle-aged woman who's trying to figure out how to get as much as she possibly can out of life. But even within that narrow sphere, the Wasserstein woman continues to think, and talk, and obsess in ways that many of us no longer have the time or patience for. Has anyone you know uttered the phrase "having it all" with a straight face since, oh, 1975? As for the generation of women, now in their 20s and 30s, who are younger than both Wasserstein and me, it's hard to imagine that these plays address their concerns and questions in ways that really speak to them.
Interestingly, Wasserstein almost acknowledges as much in "Third" by giving the menopausal feminist professor, Laurie Jameson, a daughter who has clearly inherited her mother's belief that she should get to choose how to live her life - and seems not at all likely to make the choices her mother expects. But even as she has young Emily berating her mother for her worn-out rhetoric and strategies, Wasserstein also keeps the focus clearly on Laurie, not on the younger generation (both the daughter and the title character, the conservative student Woodson Bull III) that's challenging her. Laurie may know that people are tired of hearing how she frames the debate over women's roles, but she can't seem to find a new frame.
In short, there's a reason that Hillary Clinton has been quoted as saying that Wasserstein is her favorite playwright. But there's also a reason that I sound so irritable when I'm talking about either one of them - and a reason, I would argue, why many women, even liberal women, even women who want to see women succeed, are less enthusiastic about Clinton than she might have expected.
And that reason is, to boil it down to one horribly oversimplified word: boomers! I've said it before and I'll say it again, probably before the day is out, but as someone born at the tail end of the baby boom, I am sick unto death of hearing my slightly older sisters go on and on about their lives. And - before they jump down my throat - yes, I am grateful and always will be for the doors they opened for the women who came after them, including me. But I wish they'd remember more often that women before them also opened doors, and that some of us pipsqueaks still need to do it, too.
This irritation is a subset of my larger impatience with all boomers, not just the female ones. But somehow I take it more personally when women are endlessly self-absorbed, because we should know better. I want us to be smarter, less whiny, and more genuinely curious about lives that are very different from our own. I want us to find new ways to look at work and home and friendship and self and all the complications of trying to balance them all. I want a play about the daughter's future, not the mother's past.
I also want us to be able to say exactly what we think about any woman's work and know that we are talking only about what one woman - one person - has done, and not what Woman can do. I want us to be human.
And I do, for all my complaints, want to thank Wendy Wasserstein for continuing to say that we are.
Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.
