Wendy and the Lost Boys (19 page)

O
nly one reaction truly mattered to Wendy, however—that of Daniel Freudenberger, artistic director of the Phoenix Theatre. He was so impressed by the staged reading that he offered Wendy a full production, with her O’Neill director, Steven Robman, as part of the package. The Phoenix was a venerable Off-Broadway institution, begun in 1953 on the site of the old Yiddish Art Theatre on Second Avenue. Over the years the theater had gone through several incarnations, with different aspirations and in different locations. Nevertheless it was a significant organization, which had nurtured talent—including Montgomery Clift and Meryl Streep—and was a respected producer of classics as well as new works.

The year before, in 1976, the Phoenix had taken up residence at Marymount Manhattan College on the Upper East Side, in a 250-seat theater dedicated to the work of new playwrights. It was a place to be noticed. Critics would come.

Following the success of
Uncommon Women
, Wendy left the O’Neill with two pressing problems to contend with.

She had to tell André and Bob Moss that she was taking her play back and having it produced somewhere else.

And she had to let Doug Altabef know that she wasn’t going to move to Cobble Hill with him.

She waited to deal with both these matters until she returned from the planned trip to England with Doug. The vacation went splendidly, from his point of view. They enjoyed their stay in London and their travels through the English countryside, keeping each other amused with their usual nonsensical wordplay. They rented a car, even though Wendy didn’t drive and Doug had no experience driving on the left side of the road. His confusion led to a series of riffs about which side of the road was wrong. He believed they were having fun.

Somehow they managed not to discuss whether they were moving to Brooklyn as a couple. Or possibly he thought there was nothing to discuss. He thought she’d said yes to their renting an apartment together when she actually hadn’t said anything definite.

So when they returned to New York and Wendy told him she didn’t want to move, Doug felt blindsided.

He left for Brooklyn—alone. The borough hadn’t yet evolved into the postgraduate paradise it would become a generation later. It was very quiet at night when he returned from his new job as a law associate. He had imagined a snug existence with Wendy in the attractive garden apartment he’d found for them. Instead he felt as though he’d been exiled. Within six weeks he moved back to Manhattan and a few months later began dating a paralegal at his firm. When he told Wendy, he sensed she was bothered not by his transfer of affection but rather by his new girlfriend’s profession.

“She was mortified,” he said. “How could I go from her to this regular old person?”

There it was again: superior-inferior.

While Wendy allowed her relationship with Doug Altabef to drift into oblivion, she was far more direct with André and Bob Moss, and the matter of where her play would be produced.

She asked them to meet for breakfast at a diner, near Playwrights Horizons.

The little-girl affect was gone. She was warm but businesslike. She told them the Phoenix wanted the play and that she had to go there. The Phoenix would attract better actors; it would give her visibility in a way they couldn’t. The critics would come.

Neither man offered an argument. Both of them had been at the O’Neill for the performance, squeezed in between other producers. “They were all laughing uproariously at this play,” said Moss. “André and I looked at each other and realized we lost it. We didn’t say anything to Wendy.”

But when she asked them to breakfast, they knew what was coming. “We were all crying, the three of us,” said Moss. When Wendy said, “Can we still be friends?” she already knew that the answer was yes.

“We weren’t fools,” said Moss. “We thought we could do a better job with the play artistically, because we were so in tune with Wendy and new plays were what we did. But we knew everything she was saying was true.”

They vowed they would love each other and be friends forever. “We had this incredibly loving, heartbreaking but wonderful breakfast,” said Moss. “That breakfast was about loyalty, friendship, art, business, it was about everything.”

For André Bishop that breakfast marked a seminal moment in his thinking. He knew that Wendy had made the right decision for the play and for her future. In plain terms, she got a better offer and took it.

Her decision accentuated the annoyance he’d been feeling for a while now, about the amount of time Moss had been spending at the theater in Queens. He felt that Moss’s attention had become too focused on the revivals that were the bread and butter in Queens, not the new plays that were Playwrights Horizons’ raison d’être.

Indeed, shortly after the workshop of Wendy’s play at Playwrights Horizons in March, André had scribbled a note in pencil on the back of the program for
Uncommon Women and Others,
venting his frustration.

Bob,

I strongly
feel
that you must direct
not
revivals but new plays—I’m convinced that you have so much to give to
living
playwrights (your Wasserstein comments for ex.), why waste this, yes, talent, I know you love Queens but anyone can direct an ok revival but not anyone can direct an ok new play. Plus because you are
BOB MOSS, a stubborn playwright might listen & act because of you instead of not listening to a young director.

Next year. This is important.

XX André

A
ndré Bishop didn’t appreciate it then, but Wendy had done him a huge favor. Her defection to the Phoenix made it clear to him that the need to change course was urgent. “We had lost a play that we had worked on a lot, and we lost it to a bigger and publicly ‘better’ theater,” he said. At that moment he determined that Playwrights Horizons was going to change. The theater was no longer going to fan every flame, but rather focus on fewer, better plays that would be more professionally produced and attract larger audiences. Thanks to Bob Moss, who had turned the theater over to him, André was no longer floundering. He knew, very clearly, that he wanted Playwrights Horizons to become a real presence as a New York City theater, and—though he never forgot his enormous debt to Moss—André wanted to be in charge of its destiny.

It was his Scarlett O’Hara moment. He vowed to himself that his theater would never lose a play again.

WITH THE SUCCESS OF
UNCOMMON WOMEN AND OTHERS,
WENDY BECAME A FORCE IN NEW YORK THEATER.
HERE’S THE CAST FROM THE PBS PRODUCTION,
INCLUDING MERYL STREEP (STANDING CENTER),
JILL EIKENBERRY (LEFT ON COUCH SEATED),
AND SWOOSIE KURTZ (FAR RIGHT, SEATED ON COUCH ARM).

Ten

THE EMERGENCE OF WENDY WASSERSTEIN

1977-78

Things moved quickly after Wendy
returned from the O’Neill and her trip to Europe with Douglas.
Uncommon Women
was set to open at the Phoenix on November 21, 1977, in less than three months. There was much at stake for everyone. Wendy and Steve Robman, the director, knew that this was a chance to get noticed in New York. The powers-that-be at the Phoenix wanted to prove that this latest shift in the theater’s identity—as incubator of new plays—would be the one that fulfilled the dreams of its founders.

For all its renown and longevity, the Phoenix had never quite found its place. “The dream kept almost materializing—there were many nights when the stage was bathed in unexpected glory—and then vanishing backstage somewhere, or perhaps escaping by the alley door,” wrote Walter Kerr,
New York Times
theater critic.

When the call went out for a new play with parts for nine actresses, the response was huge. Wendy introduced actresses who were her friends to Robman and to Bonnie Timmermann, the casting director. They included Alma Cuervo from Yale, for the part of Holly Kaplan, the Wendy character.

Cuervo’s audition hit every mark. She grasped how to convey Holly’s insecurity and indecision with poignancy but without making her seem pathetic. As important—and different from Kathryn Grody, who played the part at the O’Neill—Cuervo’s physical appearance more closely matched Wendy’s description of Holly Kaplan, the playwright’s alter ego: “a relier for many years on the adage ‘If she lost twenty pounds, she’d be a very pretty girl, and if she worked, she’d do very well.’ ”

Grody was devastated when she learned that Cuervo had been chosen for “her” part. She kicked herself for her outburst about Robman at the O’Neill, when she’d sat on a bench with Wendy and unleashed a litany of complaints about the director. He projected a laid-back sense of certainty that comforted some people, annoyed others. Grody found him aloof and difficult.

Wendy had listened but didn’t reveal her feelings about the director. Now Grody wondered if she had insulted Wendy by criticizing Steve Robman. But she wasn’t picked for a more straightforward reason. Both Wendy and Robman agreed that Grody was too petite to be fully convincing as Holly. Her size didn’t jibe with the text. They didn’t tell the actress their reasoning, allowing her imagination to roam free across all her shortcomings and settle on her indiscretion at the O’Neill.

If Grody had offered her theory to Wendy, she might have heard the playwright’s true feelings about the director. (Instead Wendy would tell her about them thirty years later.) Wendy agreed with many of Grody’s criticisms of Robman. She, too, thought he could be brusque, arrogant, insensitive—and complained about him to her closest friends.

Chris Durang saw the problem as a clash of temperament and style.

As he perceived it, Wendy’s gift and weakness was dialogue. The freeform conversations that made her such a popular friend helped her create characters overflowing with youthful exuberance and introspection. But there could be too much of a good thing. Her drafts were too long, and there wasn’t much time to shorten them. After working on the play for almost three years, Wendy now had less than three months to get it right. Robman didn’t bother with niceties. “Steve had that gruff, regular-guy attitude of being blunt and was always telling Wendy to cut,” Chris said, “but not in a nuanced, careful-of-feelings way.”

Even though
Uncommon Women
had gone through many incarnations since that first student production at Yale, Robman was confronting the same mechanical problems that had plagued Alan MacVey at Yale, and which Wendy had worked on with André Bishop, and then again with the group at the O’Neill. The play was written as a series of episodes, which created production obstacles when it came to making transitions from scene to scene. Shrewd though the dialogue and characterizations were, the scenes often dragged and were shapeless.

Robman was oblivious to Wendy’s irritation toward him, because she didn’t reveal it. He remembered the preparations for
Uncommon Women
as an idyllic period, a feeling echoed by many of the actresses and crew. “Wendy was wonderful to work with, because she was patient in listening to suggestions from actors but by no means a pushover,” he said.

He acknowledged that he didn’t understand either Wendy’s world or her contradictions. He was from Los Angeles, not from the East Coast universe of sophisticated girls in fancy private schools. He genuinely admired Wendy’s intelligence and talent but was perturbed by her lapses in hygiene and her tendency to eat cookies on the set. It wasn’t unusual for her to show up at rehearsal unshowered and uncombed. “Why doesn’t Wendy pull herself together?” he asked a mutual friend. “She has so much going for her.”

It was hard to reconcile the unkempt nosher and undisciplined writer with the cool businesswoman who emerged when the situation demanded. As they discussed making changes from the cast at the O’Neill, they knew there would be hurt feelings. Kathryn Grody wasn’t the only one who didn’t make the cut; only three actresses from the O’Neill—Swoosie Kurtz among them—were hired for the Phoenix production. Wendy never hesitated to make a difficult choice when she thought it was for the good of the play. “Beneath that giggly wit were shark’s teeth,” Robman said. “That’s a terribly mixed metaphor. But somewhere inside there was a sharp ambition.”

S
ome of the most promising young actresses in New York showed up at auditions, including Glenn Close—three years before
Barnum,
the musical that made her a Broadway star, and five years before
The World According to Garp,
which launched her film career. She won the small role of Leilah, the friend who is a bit distant, the academically minded young woman who ends up studying anthropology in Mesopotamia.

Another was Jill Eikenberry,
⁵
who had already appeared on Broadway and, at thirty, had the beginnings of a reputation in the New York theater.

Eikenberry had come to the tryouts to read the part of Samantha, the pretty coed destined for marriage. When she finished, Wendy asked the actress to try the role of Kate, the cool customer who becomes a lawyer and always seems to have everything under control. Kate’s outward imperviousness to doubt was familiar to Eikenberry, a beautiful woman who had been raised not to reveal any insecurity that lay behind her elegant mask of self-assuredness.

What struck Eikenberry most vividly about that day was how comfortable the experience was—because of Wendy. Usually, at an audition, the actress felt that she was the most vulnerable person in the room. But Wendy’s vulnerability was so palpable that Eikenberry read with unusual confidence, exactly what the play demanded of her character. After she was hired and they began rehearsals, Eikenberry found insights into herself as she analyzed the chinks in Kate’s armor of competence. She recognized the strain of always being the person who refuses to be less than perfect. The actress felt understood by this playwright she’d just met.

“Wendy made me feel like she was extremely grateful that I had come in,” she said. “I remember thinking there wasn’t any of the usual feeling of ‘What am I doing?’ or ‘Am I going to be okay?’ Right from the beginning, it felt good.”

As opening day approached, uncertainty crept into the charmed atmosphere. Steve Robman began to see only the flaws: the awkward transitions, the caricatures, the absence of a defining plot. The characters no longer seemed like an endearing ensemble representing the concerns and confusion of contemporary, educated young women, but like spoiled, self-involved shallow creatures with no wisdom to impart.

He ran into André Bishop and Bob Moss at the bumpy first preview. Robman didn’t have to ask what they thought when he saw the grim looks on their faces.

Bob Moss said to him, “You’ve got to tell the actresses to love the play.”

The performances improved. As the actresses got better and better in subsequent previews, Wendy’s anxiety increased proportionately. She was worried about the reaction of her Mount Holyoke friends; she also made sure they knew about the play.

Wendy invited Mary Jane Patrone, her Mount Holyoke friend considered a “hottie” at Amherst, to come to previews the weekend before opening night. The two women had remained close, though Mary Jane lived in Massachusetts. When she asked what the play was about, Wendy replied, “Oh, it’s about my sisters.”

On Friday night Mary Jane stood in the back with Chris Durang.

As the play got under way, she began to realize that many of the words she was hearing were familiar. They were
her
words—coming out of the mouth of the character called Muffet DiNicola. Then she heard other familiar echoes, as though the actresses were projections from the not-distant past—
her
past.

“Whoa,” she thought, “wait a minute.”

Then she realized that Chris Durang wasn’t watching the stage, he was watching her.

It rapidly dawned on Mary Jane why Chris was looking at her. The
Uncommon Women and Others
of the title weren’t metaphorical. Wendy was writing about her friends and their experience at Mount Holyoke.

Mary Jane felt overcome by an uneasy sensation, not quite betrayal but something unpleasant, as she watched Wendy’s recapitulation of their communal life. It was as though her memories had been stolen and altered. The play was rooted enough in reality that when there was a deviation, Mary Jane found herself thinking, “Oh, she didn’t get that character right.”

In Rita, the disaffected woman searching for her place, once again played by Swoosie Kurtz, Mary Jane saw Ruth Karl—exaggerated, more extroverted, and funnier, but recognizable. Leilah, the anthropology student who goes to Mesopotamia, was Annie Betteridge, who had gone to Iran after graduation. Kate, the attractive lawyer who had it all pulled together, bore a close resemblance to Harriet Sachs, their Canadian friend, now back in Toronto practicing law, settled into a relationship with her longtime boyfriend. Holly was Wendy.

It would take some time for Mary Jane to gain perspective on the strange ability she hadn’t realized Wendy possessed. “She takes things she knows and characters she knows and Wendifies them, probably making them more interesting than they are in real life,” she said. Eventually Mary Jane saw some advantage in being part of the process. “It was cool in a way to be immortalized,” she said.

That night, however, she was quite disturbed, and she told Wendy as much. After the play they returned to Wendy’s apartment and talked. Wendy told Mary Jane, “It’s not really you. All the characters are me.” The rest of their conversation dissolved into a blur. Mary Jane was still in shock.

She saw
Uncommon Women and Others
two more times that weekend, and began to understand what Wendy was saying. She needed to understand Wendy’s reasoning, for the sake of their friendship. It had been tested before—the awful letter Wendy wrote to Mary Jane after their junior year at Amherst, telling her she didn’t want to live together (and then changing her mind).

Mary Jane forgave Wendy but never forgot how mortified she felt. “I hated that play,” she said.

O
pening night: November 21, 1977.

A sense of momentum had been building all day. Western Union telegrams began arriving at the theater. There was one from Lloyd Richards on behalf of the O’Neill and another from Howard Stein at the Yale School of Drama. Even Bob Brustein, who had previously dismissed
Uncommon Women,
chimed in: BEST WISHES TO ALL YOU UNCOMMON PEOPLE FROM YOUR FRIENDS AT YALE.

Just as Wendy had hoped, the Phoenix generated buzz. Major critics from the New York press showed up for the opening. That night, whatever their differences had been during production, Wendy and Steve Robman were united in their nervousness and excitement. This was a major debut for both of them. How would their efforts be received? The actresses seemed to be electrifying and endearing; the audience laughed and sighed in all the right places. Or did they? Wendy had experienced enthusiastic audiences at Yale only to find that the official response to her work was icy silence.

Besides, she knew that this was a friendly audience. Ticket sales had been slow for the unknown playwright’s debut. It could be deadly for critics to sit in an empty theater, listening to laugh lines drop into a silent void. Shortly before opening night, Jim Cavanaugh, a drama professor at Mount Holyoke, received a telephone call from the house manager, a Smith graduate who had taken a directing course with him. “Since nobody knows Wendy, we’ve got an awful lot of empty seats for the opening,” she said. “I’ll give a comp ticket to any alum from Wendy’s years at Mount Holyoke you can round up.”