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Wasserstein is herself the youngest of three sisters

[[image - photograph of Wendy Wasserstein, by Peter Cunningham]]
[[caption]] Plays are Wasserstein's "favorite thing" [[/caption]]

'You're Wendy Wasserstein. Are you writing?' And I thought of just saying, 'Well, actually, I'm on the phone.'" She breaks into her distinctive laugh, which Andre Bishop describes as "her infectious high-pitched giggle."

"Yes, you do feel pressure," she says, "you do feel the fear of people saying when you write a new play that they liked the other one better, of getting built up by the prize only to be taken down later. So I think the best thing you can do in a sense is to concentrate on the work itself."

The Sisters Rosensweig is set in London, and as in the play by Anton Chekhov, the sisters number three. Sara, played by Jane Alexander, is a 54-year-old, Brooklyn-born, divorced and highly successful expatriate banker with a teen-age daughter; Dr. Gorgeous Rosenweig Felberbaum, portrayed by Madeline Kahn, is 46, lives with her husband and family in Newton, Mass., and is shepherding the Beth-El Sisterhood on a tour of London; Pfeni (born Penny) Rosen-sweig, 40, played by Christine Estabrook, is an international travel writer who prefers shopping bags to suitcases. Robert Klien and John Vickery portray two of the men in their lives--a fake-fur furrier and a director, respectively. The play's director is Dan Sullivan, the artistic director of the Seattle Repertory Theater who also staged Heidi.

Wasserstein readily acknowledges the link to Chekhov. "The play is part commercial boulevard comedy and part that's sort of serious, with almost Chekhovian parts to it in a way," she says. "I've always been a big fan of Chekov, so I thought the idea of three sisters would be a novel one for a play." And she laughs.

The combination of humor and seriousness, so essential to Wasserstein's plays, is, of course, the basic mixture that defines what Wasserstein herself has called in an article some years ago in The New York Times, the "sad-funny, funny-sad" works of Chekhov. "In Chekhov the comic and the tragic are not separated, she wrote. "They are molded into one spirit."

Wasserstein says that she got the idea for The Sisters Rosensweig while she was writing Heidi. "I wrote a lot of Heidi in London, she says, while I was on a grant, and I kept on thinking about writing about Americans in London. I thought that the while milieu was interesting--the expatriate idea, the sense of escaping oneself, escaping being an American, escaping being Jewish."

And, she says, she very much wanted to write "something that was slightly different from what I had written before, especially in terms of the form of the play. I wanted to write your basic, well-made living-room play because all my other plays have been so episodic. And I also did not want to write a play specifically about the same people again."

There has been a lot of Wendy Wasserstein in her other plays; this time, she says, "the attempt was to write something that wasn't about me." But nonetheless, there still seems to be a lot of Wendy Wasserstein in The Sisters Rosensweig. "What?" she says. "Just because I'm the youngest of three sisters? I thought

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