Homage to Wendy Wasserstein

Wendy Wasserstein died this morning at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center from lymphoma. She was 55 years old.

I remember years ago attending the last performance of her Pulitzer Prize-winning play "The Heidi Chronicles" on Broadway. I was dating a woman involved in the production and got to attend the party afterwards. Wasserstein's friends joked that she had won every possible award for the play except one, and it was time she got it -- and then brought out a breathtaking and exact replica of the Heisman Trophy. It's one of the moments that made that evening memorable for me (the other was being serenaded by Alma Cuervo with a drunken rendition of "Old Man River").

For those of us now in our mid-40s, Wasserstein's "Uncommon Women and Others," which most of us saw in its PBS incarnation, instead of in the theater, is her defining play, simply because it spoke to us, whether we were male or female, about what life was and what it could offer. It might have been to us what Clifford Odets's "Awake and Sing!" was to Alfred Kazin's generation. Suddenly we realized that our own lives were -- or at least could be -- the stuff of theater. I ran into more than one woman in college who said that Wasserstein's play had a huge impact on her life (one of them, now a respected archivist in Washington, admitted to being obsessed with the character of Rita in that play and I regret now that I didn't go up to Wasserstein on the night "Heidi Chronicles" closed and tell her that. I suspect she might have gotten a kick out of it).

Wendy Wasserstein may have lost her battle with lymphoma this morning, but I have a feeling that her best work is going to be around for a while.

Tom Moran