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SERIOUS LAUGHTER

In The Sisters Rosensweig Wendy Wasserstein combines the comic and the serious with a deft Chekhovian touch

[[image - group photograph, by Martha Swope]]
[caption]] The sisters Rosensweig: Christine Estabrook, Jane Alexander and Madeline Kahn [[/caption]]

Wendy Wasserstein is laughing.

Wendy Wasserstein loves to laugh, even at herself. Take this story she tells about march 30, 1989, an award-winning day in her life: "My mother telephoned my aunts," she says, "and told them I won the Nobel Prize. And my Aunt Florence said: 'Really? So when is she going to Stockholm?'"

It wasn't the Nobel Prize, of course, it was the Pulitzer Prize in drama, for her long-running Broadway hit The Heidi Chronicles. As far as her mother was concerned, though, the Pulitzer was "just as good," Wasserstein says. And she laughs again.

In a 20-year playwriting career that has included Uncommon Women and Others and Isn't It Romantic? as well as The Heidi Chronicles-which also won the Tony Award as Best Play of the 1988-89 season - Wasserstein has lavished much of that laughter (combined with generous and genuine helpings of insight, depth, caring and concern) on the confused, difficult and potentially liberated lives, loves and careers of young and not-so-young women in this somewhat feminist and enlightened age. Her new play, The Sisters Rosenzweig, her first since Heidi, continues those themes-but with crucial differences. (It opened October 22 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center and recently moved to Broadway's Ethel Barrymore Theatre.)

In the world of theatre, which like every other field has its share of petty jealousies disagreements and personality conflicts, Wasserstein is a rarity, someone liked and respected by just about everyone. Andre Bishop, who has been involved in presenting Wasserstein's plays since 1973, first at Playwrights Horizons and now as artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater, put it this way in his introduction to a collection of her plays: "Wendy, like Heidi, is a serious good person, and her considerable achievements have come about because she is good and because she is serious."

Wasserstein, who recently turned 42, admits that before the opening of The Sisters Rosensweig she found herself in a unique situation in her career. This work was her first play since the much-honored Heidi. All those awards brought many good things, she says, including increased fame and recognition and some of the financial rewards of success. But they also carried with them a great deal of pressure.

"I remember one evening I was in the Carlyle Hotel calling on a friend," she recalls, "and a woman came up to be while I was on the telephone and said:

by Mervyn Rothstein

8


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