Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the first woman playwright to win a Tony Award, Wendy Wasserstein was a Broadway titan. But with her high-pitched giggle and unkempt curls, she projected an image of warmth and familiarity. Everyone knew Wendy Wasserstein. Or thought they did. Born in Brooklyn on October 18, 1950 to Polish Jewish immigrant parents, Wendy was the youngest of Lola and Morris Wasserstein’s five children. Her mother had big dreams for her children, and they didn’t disappoint: Sandra, Wendy’s glamorous sister, became a high-ranking corporate executive at a time when Fortune 500 companies were an impenetrable boys club. Their brother Bruce became a billionaire superstar of the investment banking world. Yet behind the family’s remarkable success was a fiercely guarded world of private tragedies.
Named for Peter Pan’s Wendy, Wasserstein came to represent the baby boom generation. She was a daughter of the 1950s, an artist who came of age during the freewheeling 1970s, a powerful woman in 1980s New York, and a single mother at the turn of the century: her very life spoke to the tensions of an era of great change. In the free space of the theater, Wasserstein spoke in the most intimate of terms about everything that matters most: family and love, dreams and devastation.
Call it fate, demographic probability, or simply the kind of thing that would make Wasserstein laugh that famous high-pitched giggle, even as she spun the facts into another bittersweet, funny-serious story of a modern woman’s search for her place in the world. As she herself would say, “Funny is a very complicated issue.”
WATCH: Mount Holyoke exhibit celebrates Wendy Wasserstein’s life
OPEN DOORS
In 1998, with Roy Harris, Wendy helped begin a mentoring program designed to encourage love of theater in youngsters who might not have access to it. Since Open Doors began, more than 1,220 students have participated. In 2005, she said, “I can say in all honesty, this is the best thing I’ve ever done.” To learn more, click here
