Despite negative reviews in all I the New York papers, the night I saw An American Daughter, the latest Broadway offering by the Pulitzer-prize- winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein, the audience was packed with visibly high-powered, sophisticated Manhattanites. They bore little resemblance to the now-typical Broadway audience of tourists, suburbanites, aging Jews, and homosexuals.
That Wasserstein can bring such an audience into a Broadway theater indicates just what a cultural icon she has become. Her work is as pure a reflection of what the liberal establishment thinks of itself and the rest of us as, say, the punditry of her close friend Frank Rich, the New York Times columnist. In particular, she is understood to be the chronicler of America’s women. Not all of them, to be sure; just the best and the brightest.
An American Daughter is the latest installation in the saga of the Mount Holyoke class of 1972 — its friends, relatives, and significant others, their life choices, and the consequences that follow. Wasserstein began the series with Uncommon Women and Others, set at Mount Holyoke before graduation and over the next few years as a group of young women begin to construct their lives at a moment rolled by feminist promises. It was followed by Isn’t It Romantic, featuring Janie, a funny, smart but somewhat unfocused, overweight but adorable Jewish woman, and her best friend, Harriet, a thin, driven WASP, dealing with men, marriage, and independence against a backdrop of feminist orthodoxy. Janie, the Wasserstein stand-in, decides that marriage is too much of a compromise of selfhood.
In the Pulitzer-prize-winning Heidi Chronicles, Heidi, an amalgam of Janie and Harriet, pursues a career as an art historian, conducts an affair with a man who becomes a philandering liberal politician, and ends up alone with an adopted baby, wondering whether she was the only one who took the dictates of feminism seriously.
The Sisters Rosensweig, her biggest hit, tells the story of three sisters at midlife, and their failed or deeply troubled relationships with inadequate men.
Now Wasserstein has moved on to politics. An American Daughter, set in Washington, has a plot loosely based on the Zoe Baird confirmation fiasco. As it opens, Lyssa Dent Hughes, a physician and advocate of medical care for the poor, has just been nominated to be surgeon general. A graduate of Miss Porter’s and a college classmate of the president’s wife, Lyssa is the daughter of a conservative senator from Indiana. As played by Kate Nelligan, she is cool and contained, organized and professional. She is married to a slightly schlumpy Jewish sociologist, Walter Abrahmson, who loves and is proud of her but is facing his own midlife crisis, exacerbated by his wife’s sudden quantum leap up the success ladder. Some years earlier, Walter wrote a book called Toward a Lesser Elite that was the defining liberal text of its moment. He has done little of note since. The couple have two sons, whose voices are heard offstage, but who are never seen, which seems like an unintentionally accurate depiction of the role of children in the lives of Wasserstein-style superwomen.
Lyssa’s best friend, Judith Kaufman, is a black Jewish oncologist profoundly miserable about her childlessness and nearing the end of unsuccessful in-vitro fertilization efforts. What the author intended by making Judith black is a puzzle — as written, the character is entirely Jewish, with no specific attributes to suggest black cultural identity — though perhaps she wants to suggest Judith is even more of an outsider than the usual Wasserstein stand-in.
Two former students of Walter’s also figure prominently. First there is Morrow McCarthy (Bruce Norris), a close family friend who is, we are told, a gay conservative. The character, who is not notably conservative, turns out to be based on Andrew Sullivan, the not notably conservative former New Republic editor, which suggests just how insular Wassetstein’s universe of references is. The second student is a “neo-feminist” named Quincy Quince who has written a hot book on gender and who uses her almost parodically aggressive sexuality to pursue a media career.
Lyssa is eager to be the surgeon general, not for any self-serving reason but because there is just so much good she can do. This good amounts to protecting the “right to choose,” which is threatened as usual, and providing health care for the poor.
But in the course of a profile-interview with a TV journalist, the gay conservative Morrow McCarthy lets slip that Lyssa once failed to answer a jury-duty summons, showing contempt for the obligations that less important Americans take seriously. If that weren’t enough to sink a nomination, remarks she makes about her mother, a housewife who made ice-box cakes and cheese-pimento canapes, are misconstrued. They cause a furor among the Indiana housewives who are among her father’s most loyal constituents, among others.
In the face of controversy, the president bails, just as the real one did with Lani Guinier, without so much as a phone call to Lyssa. The characters bemoan the media scrutiny that attends presidential appointments these days. They complain that they no longer know what it means to be “smart” and that America sets impossible standards for women who merely wish to serve. As the nomination sinks, Quincy Quince points out that Lyssa’s generation — that is, Hillary’s generation — is earnest and dowdy, bereft of sexuality, in contrast to her own peers, who really like sex a lot.
It seems all that superwoman effort has cost Lyssa her spark. So it is not much of a surprise when Walter chooses the very moment his beloved wife is under national scrutiny and sinking fast to cheat on her with Quincy Quince. Irony of ironies, the only male character who does not betray Lyssa is her father, the conservative senator.
As the critics said, An American Daughter is a failure. Wasserstein is out of her milieu writing about politics, and there are too many plot twists that go nowhere for the play to hang together. But if it is not very successful as entertainment, or as political satire, it is not without value. The play is, in its way, a weather report on the Zeitgeist among our nation’s liberal elites. And the forecast in those regions gets colder and bleaker as the seasons progress.
For, intentionally or not, An American Daughter is a plausible depiction of what life has become for those scions of the liberal establishment who presumed that they would lead the nation in its political and cultural enterprises, but have awoken to a post-Reagan world in which ” Indiana housewives” and their ilk can derail a cabinet nomination over cultural values. What really sinks Lyssa’s exemplary nomination is not the putative arrogance of ignoring a jury-duty summons, but the “innocent” remarks she makes about her stay-at-home mother, who died when she was a teenager. She was, Lyssa says, an “ordinary housewife” who made “icebox cake” and other postwar treats at which any sophisticate would laugh.
Lyssa cannot think of any interests or accomplishments to add to this description of her mother, and the “Indiana housewives” intuit the contempt lurking in this remark and take revenge on her. In later conversation, her father informs her that her mother was not the dolt she assumed. That the same might be true of “Indiana housewives” escapes the nominee. It seems odd that Wasserstein promotes the fast-fading career woman/weekend mom position so dogmatically. (A remarkable side note: In a recent interview in Newsday, Kate Nelligan, who plays Lyssa, points out that she had not been seen on Broadway for the past several years because, when her son was born, she found herself unable to abandon him to a nanny. She told the interviewer she believes it is a mother’s duty to raise her children and thus has little sympathy for the character she plays.)
Wasserstein is credited with being the bard of her generation’s women. One wonders whether she is conscious of the fact that, taken as a whole, her oeuvre can be read as a superb indictment of the feminist way of life. In play after play, Wasserstein’s characters end up alone; family and the happiness it generates are eroded; careerism does not provide meaning; men, ruined by the sexual revolution, are weak, philandering, and narcissistic; children are absent or neglected.
And now, the voters are rejecting all the good they want to do. Twenty years into what will undoubtedly be a chronicle of their lives from college to death, Wendy Wasserstein’s uncommon women are uncommonly unhappy, their lives a mockery of all
CORRECTION-DATE: June 9, 1997
CORRECTION:
Apologies to Lisa Schiffren, whose review last week of playwright Wendy Wasserstein’s An American Daughter had its concluding line amputated by a technical glitch at the printer (yes, it really does happen that way sometimes). Here is the last paragraph, as it should have appeared:
“And now, the voters are rejecting all the good they want to do. Twenty years into what will undoubtedly be a chronicle of their lives from college to death, Wendy Wasserstein’s uncommon women are uncommonly unhappy, their lives a mockery of all that early promise.”
Lisa Schiffren is a writer living in New York.
