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Wasserstein wanted to write a romance-"where two grown people connect to each other, even if it's for a night"

that if I write this play, my oldest sister will meet a furrier. I told her to be very nice to the furrier that comes into her house."

The sisters, like Wasserstein, were born in Brooklyn, Unlike her, however, none of them went to Mount Holyoke College, an experience she described in Uncommon Women and Others, or to the Yale School of Drama.

"Although I do have a sister whose nickname is Gorgeous," Wasserstein says. "But she doesn't live in Newton, and she certainly isn't Dr. Gorgeous."

What the play is about, she says, is "those three sisters and their needs for each other and the sadness in their lives. The sadness is about growing older. And the happinesses they have. And the happiness they don't have. And, in a Chekhovian way, how your life can change in little ways over one weekend."

Unlike Heidi, The Sisters Rosenweig is about romance. "Heidi is about someone making a life for herself alone, establishing herself separately," Wasserstein says. "For the sisters Rosenweig I wanted two grown people to connect to each other, even if it's for a night. I thought that's interesting. If that can happen, even as an idea, that's hopeful. Sometimes you write stuff in a play and it becomes true in life. And I wanted to write a romance. I thought that in all of my plays somebody ends up alone. So in this play in particular I didn't want to end with those three sisters alone."

"The other thing," she says, "was I wanted to write a play in which I like the men very much. And I like the men in this play very much."

Wasserstein says that The Sisters Rosenweig was "unbelievably difficult" to write. For one, she says, "it's hard to try to be serious in a comedic vein."

And then there's the matter of form. "I was in a panel with John Guare and David Henry Hwang," she says, "and at the end Jonh Guare turned to me and said, 'Wendy, aren't you glad that naturalism is dead, that realism is dead?' And I thought, 'I've just written a living-room play, John.' We spend so much time talking about breaking out of the classic form, and what's interesting is to go back to the form and try to do it. it's extremely difficult. A.R. Gurney uses the form very well, but he's slightly older. For someone from my generation you get into episodic and television and stuff."

Wasserstein has written for "television and stuff." She has also completed a screenplay for the Heidi Chronicles, "though I don't know what will happen to it," she says.

But, she adds, "my favorite thing is writing plays. In terms of being a writer, in terms of the respect actors have for you, in terms of the respect directors have for you. They actually talk to you.

"it was very interesting to me last year when Murphy Brown as an unmarried woman had her baby, and the whole situation made this giant splash," she says. "I thought about Heidi, another married woman with a baby. And I thought of how many more millions of people you hit when something happens on television. When something happens in the theatre, it's smaller. But, in fact, what's great about the theatre is that it's where ideas originate. It's an art. You don't have to take 36 meetings to put on a play. you just sit down and write the play. Nobody has sat me down, as they would if I was writing a movie, and said, 'Well, these three sisters shouldn't be in London, they should be in middle America so it's more accessible,' or 'Sara shouldn't be a banker, she really should be in the insurance business so everyone will relate to her,' or 'The sisters shouldn't be Jewish because Jewish takes it out of the ball game.' All of the stuff doesn't happen. In the theatre there's respect for the author. It has to do with the individual. It's you play. It's your voice."

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