I was surprised to see today that playwright Wendy Wasserstein died. She was 55.
Her plays are noted for their depictions of contemporary "everywomen". If your concept of an everywoman is an ivy league educated, upper middle class professional flummoxed by her roles and desires in life. In college I read her Tony and Pulitzer-winning "The Heidi Chronicles". My classmates and I were critical of the story because the heroine wasn't a feminist the way we wanted her to be. She survived school dances as a teenager, was intimidated by radical lesbians in college, fell in love with two men - one married, the other gay - and opted to adopt a baby at the end of the story. She was milquetoast.
What was particularly troubling about the play for me was that critics frequently called it "feminist". I think it's more fitting to call it "contemporary".
Coincidentally, also today I took a nap while watching the HBO production of Tony Kushner's Tony and Pulitzer-winning play "Angels in America". The story is set in the mid 1980s at the onset of the AIDS crisis. In the show's first half hour the character Harper Pitt contemplates the weakened ozone layer over Antartica. She also, as others do in the play, ponders the chaos that may come at the turn of the millenium.
Which got me thinking, as I drifted off. Looking at history through a biblical prism, we often miss the signals God sends us. The Old Testament prophets predicted that a great leader would come to redeem God's people. Most expected a warrior king. We got a baby instead, the New Testament tells us. In a burst of Eastern Philosophy, God wanted to help us understand His nature, while experiencing His own creation as one of us. Was it not what we expected or not what we wanted? Was it what we needed?
When the millenium came - and went - we were warned by the Television prophets to expect calamity and destruction.
Inspired by Kushner, I thought about the destruction of the Earth. Maybe the calamity and destruction is here. But, like a Christmas infant, it isn't what we expected. The planet is falling apart. The fragile outer shell is a honeycombed network of oxygen molecules that we routinely neglect. Invisible poison sunshine, melting icebergs. And our leaders deny there is a problem. We don't get erupting volcanoes and raining sulphur. Maybe the quiet destruction is what we need. Because we've also been given the intellect to reverse it ourselves. Maybe self-reliance is the next gift we get.
Wasserstein's heroine lambasts a friend who indicates that by becoming a mother she has reached her potential. Kushner's hero refuses an offer from heaven in order to imbibe in more living. Both characters take what they want, and each worries about how they are perceived because of their choices. I'm slightly tormented by the fact that I'll never get the chance to meet Wendy Wasserstein and convince her to write a really great feminist character. But comforted by the thought that she probably wouldn't care what I think.
