Wendy and the Lost Boys

by Julie Salamon

  He thought she was being nice, but she was serious. She asked him to direct the two one-acts—Welcome to My Rash and Psyche in Love—at the Kennedy Center festival at the end of the summer.

  While they were in New Hampshire, the two of them went out to dinner at the Hancock Inn, a fifteen-minute drive from MacDowell. They began talking to their waiter, a good-looking, strapping young man, who told them his story. He said he’d been a student at Wesleyan and had been accused of plagiarism three times. He was certain the accusations arose because he was a wrestler and there was an anti-jock bias. But he assured them he knew how to write a good paper; he’d gone to boarding school at Andover.

  When Barakiva and Wendy left the restaurant, she told the waiter, “Next time you get accused of plagiarism, tell the professor the feminist playwright Wendy Wasserstein believes you wrote the paper.”

  He thanked her, but Barakiva could see that the waiter had no idea who she was. Outside, Wendy said to Barakiva, “There’s a play there.”

  He responded, “Nah, we both just think he’s attractive. I don’t see it at all.”

  Shortly after that, Wendy began writing a one-act play she called Third; one character is a young man named Woodson Bull III, modeled on the waiter they’d met that night. The other is a middle-aged feminist professor, who accuses him of plagiarism.

  Barakiva mentioned to Wendy a life-altering class he’d taken on King Lear when he was at Vassar, taught by Ann E. Imbrie, a professor about Wendy’s age who had cancer. Wendy decided that the central argument between her two characters would focus on a paper the student writes about King Lear.

  “I’ve never seen somebody take, like, half an idea and then make a play out of it,” said Barakiva. “And now I can’t imagine that play being about anything but King Lear. She just saw that’s what it’s going to be about.”

  When they returned home from MacDowell, they called Imbrie for thoughts on a radical feminist interpretation of Lear. From these discussions Wendy created an argument for her fictional professor, Laurie Jameson; shrewdly mocking academic feminism, she made Jameson the author of Girls Will Be Boys: The Demasculinization of Tropes in Western Literature. In the play Jameson declares that Cordelia, Lear’s beloved youngest daughter, isn’t the heroine of the play, but rather a victim. “What has been seen as the tragedy of Lear is actually the girlification of Cordelia,” Jameson declares.

  The student accused of plagiarism eventually forces Jameson to rethink her didacticism while he acknowledges she has led him to rethink the meaning of King Lear. Through this conceit Wendy addressed the futility of her own real-life furies.

  The professor in Third is consumed by “free-floating anxiety.” She tells her therapist, “I keep thinking about a James Taylor song I listened to when I was in college. The lyric went something like, ‘Guess my feet know where they want me to go, walking down a country road.’ I keep thinking about that country road, and I don’t know where the hell it goes. God, I hate the times we’re living in.”

  By August a one-act version of Third was ready. That fall, in preparation for the workshop at Theater J, Wendy decided to ax Psyche in Love. Working with Barakiva, she folded some of the play’s passages into Welcome to My Rash and continued to develop Third, which was emerging as the stronger piece.

  On December 15 there was another reading for Dan Sullivan at Lincoln Center of Welcome to My Rash, this time with Third. That reading clarified matters for the director. He decided that Welcome to My Rash didn’t carry enough weight to take it further. Third, on the other hand, had potential but would have to be expanded. “Third seemed to be incomplete as an idea and too large an idea for a one-act,” said Sullivan. “I suggested the idea of making it a full play.”

  André was heartened by Sullivan’s response. He felt that Wendy, now a mature writer, was on the verge of expanding her range. “She was very involved in the world and of course her daughter’s life,” he said. “All of that would have renewed her. You could see her moral stature as an older person having gone through these midyears of unhappiness and anger and bitterness. Having a child, exasperating as it can be, renews you, and I feel her writing was beginning to be renewed.”

  But her forward momentum was given yet another massive jolt. Two weeks after the Lincoln Center reading, on December 30, 2003, Gerry Gutierrez was found dead in his apartment at age fifty-three, a decade after surviving throat cancer. Cause of death: complications from the flu. The obituary in the Washington Post carried biographical details Gutierrez had once listed as a joke in a theatrical Who’s Who: “married Wendy J. Wasserstein (a writer), December 3, 1983 (divorced, December, 1986); children: Ginger Joy, Phyllis Kate, Edna Elizabeth.”

  The “children” were Wendy’s cat and Gutierrez’s dogs.

  At Gutierrez’s memorial service the following spring, Wendy spoke about his being in the delivery room the day Lucy Jane was born. “He will always live in my heart, whenever I look at my daughter and whenever I am in a theater,” she said.

  The Washington Post obituary got it wrong, she said. “Gerry and I were never divorced. He will always be my husband.”

  She returned to the theme of family. “I think Gerry made me and all of us here today part of his extended family,” she said. “Gerry created families in the theater.”

  Welcome to My Rash and Third were presented as a Theatre J workshop production in January 2004 and received encouraging reviews. “There is a sense of loss and a largeness of heart in these new works that show breathtaking maturity,” wrote the reviewer in the Washington Times.

  Michael Barakiva was singled out for directing “with delicacy and care.” Wendy returned from Washington determined to follow Dan Sullivan’s advice and expand Third. She had made it clear to Barakiva that if André wanted to produce the play at Lincoln Center, Dan Sullivan would replace her protégé as director.

  Barakiva appreciated her directness. “I knew a twenty-seven-year old director is not going to direct Wendy Wasserstein’s premiere in New York,” he said. “The fact that I got to work on the plays at all—the experience and the knowledge for me—was invaluable, the defining moment of my directing career.”

  For most of the next year, Wendy concentrated on expanding Third and working on her novel, though she managed to squeeze in a book review for the Times, to write the introduction to the American Ballet Theatre’s televised version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and to testify with Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Miller before the Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington on behalf of a bill meant to give playwrights more clout in negotiating contracts with producers. She and Bruce were honored at a fund-raising dinner at the Pierre Hotel for the Bank Street College of Education. She and Tony Kushner spoke about Jewish culture at the Jewish Community Center on the Upper West Side.

  She tried to be attentive to Lucy Jane. When Lucy was four, they visited the set of Sesame Street, where they met the show’s executive producer, Lewis Bernstein, and discovered that he was married to Wendy’s old friend from yeshiva, Gaya Aranoff, now a physician. Shortly after that, they all met at a restaurant for dinner. Wendy asked Aranoff and Bernstein, who were observant Jews, if she could bring Lucy Jane to their home one Friday night for a “real” Sabbath dinner—one that wasn’t ordered in from Shun Lee.

  About a year later, in 2004, Wendy and Lucy visited the Aranoff-Bernsteins in Riverdale. “Wendy was funny, telling us stories,” said Aranoff. “She wanted Lucy Jane to see the candles. We did kiddush, washing hands, the whole ritual with challah. I could tell that it touched her.”

  Despite all this activity, Wendy was growing sicker, though she refused to acknowledge it. Bill Finn confronted her one evening when they were eating out together. “Something is wrong,” he told her. “We have to get you help, to take care of you.” She responded by leaving the restaurant, hailing a taxi, and going home.

  “Where does he get off saying this?” she asked Rhoda, their mutual friend. After that, Rhoda trod softly when talking to Wendy about
medical issues. She had accompanied Wendy to doctors’ appointments and listened to her friend downplay her symptoms. Wendy was an accomplished dramatist, able to convince her friends and even her doctors what she herself needed to believe: If she kept moving, she just might trick fate.

  DIANNE WÏEST AND CHARLES DURNING STARRED IN THIRD, WENDY’S

  FINAL PLAY, WHICH, NEW YORK TIMES CRITIC BEN BRANTLEY

  SAID, “EXHALES A GENTLE BREATH OF AUTUMN, A RUEFUL

  AWARENESS OF DEATH AND OF SEASONS PAST.”

  Twenty-three

  THE FINAL PRODUCTION

  2005

  In January 2005 Wendy and Chris Durang agreed to be part of a symposium on humor sponsored by the Key West Literary Seminar. The seminar had become a popular boondoggle for writers, offering a warm retreat in the dead of winter from colder climates and from the persistent self-doubt and financial pressures that can overwhelm creative souls. In this balmy, laid-back atmosphere, writers were made to feel important and comfortable. There were many opportunities to mingle with one another in a no-compete zone, as well as to talk and perform before appreciative audiences. Key West had become more commercialized and gentrified over the years, but this haven for gay people, literary types, and assorted dropouts remained charming and tacky enough. Within these cozy confines, where people typically walked or rode their bikes as a form of transportation, the visiting writers could feel themselves to be heirs to the literary tradition of historic locals like Ernest Hemingway and Tennessee Williams.

  Chris arrived a day before Wendy, in time for the opening ceremonies and receptions. Except for flecks of gray in his hair and a thickened middle, he still radiated a devilish sweetness, a boyish apprehension. He felt insecure about their panel for many reasons. The lineup had changed; Terrence McNally, who had a house in Key West, was supposed to be part of the discussion with him and Wendy, but McNally had canceled at the last minute. Chris worried that the audience would know Wendy, from either her plays or essays or television appearances, but wouldn’t know him. They were the only playwrights; this wasn’t a theater crowd.

  More worries: Chris had checked out talks by Billy Collins, the former poet laureate of the United States; Roy Blount Jr., the southern novelist; and Calvin Trillin, the popular New Yorker writer. All of them had given great performances. Chris decided he and Wendy should prepare something entertaining, so they wouldn’t end up answering tedious questions like, “What’s the difference between humor in theater and in books or movies?”

  She was flying in late that evening with five-year-old Lucy Jane and Emmy, the nanny, so they just talked briefly, long enough to agree they shouldn’t wing it. They would meet in the morning to work out the details.

  Wendy was staying with Lucy Jane and Emmy at the Paradise Inn, in a snug bungalow tucked among flowering jasmine and red ginger. The next morning, while Chris waited for Wendy to get ready, he sat on a couch outside, on a screened-in porch, uncertain about what it would be like to see her. The Bell’s palsy got better and worse, but it never fully disappeared.

  When Wendy greeted him that morning in Key West he was relieved. Her face wasn’t quite the face of Wendy the “vicious dumpling”—the smile was slightly off—but she looked good. She seemed happy as she plopped down next to him on the couch. Lucy joined them a few minutes later. The tiny baby had grown into a normal-size girl, slender and fair.

  Chris didn’t see Lucy that often, so she was a bit shy, sitting on the other side of Wendy. She kept peeking at Chris, and eventually they made eye contact. He waved. She waved back, and they both smiled. He was happy they’d connected and looked forward to building a real relationship with Wendy’s little girl. It was a nice moment, there on the couch, and it occurred to Chris that this was the first time in years he’d seen Wendy just being relaxed. Usually she was running from thing to thing.

  The entire day brought back warm memories of earlier, happier times. They left Emmy and Lucy at the bungalow and went to a nearby diner, to work on their presentation. That, too, was fun, reminding him of their earlier collaborations; the last one was in 1994, when they wrote a comedy sketch based on the Greek tragedy Medea for the twenty-fifth-anniversary celebration of Juilliard’s drama division. While they ate eggs, Chris suggested they read from their crackpot Medea at the symposium.

  When they went back to her bungalow so Wendy could change clothes, he noticed—with relief—that she was walking normally. They had a pleasant walk along funky, vulgar Duval Street to the San Carlos Institute, the elegant historic building where the panels took place. Only when they walked up the stairs to the stage did she need steadying. He barely noticed; she made no fuss about it.

  The organizers of the literary seminar taped the sessions. Even on the recording, the connection between audience and speakers is palpable. Wendy and Chris were in top form. They read their version of Medea, about a scorned wife seeking to exact revenge on her philandering husband, with Wendy as Medea and Chris as everyone else. First Wendy set the stage, making the classic approachable.

  “How many of you in the audience have ever acted in Greek tragedy? How many of your lives are Greek tragedy?” Her voice was deep, warm, and filled with humor.

  In their slapstick version, Jason’s mistress is “Dreaded Debbie, debutante from hell.” Jason rebukes Medea by telling her he’s keeping the children and enrolling them in the Dalton School (the Manhattan private school attended by Bruce Wasserstein’s older three children). Giggling, they reached the finale, where a deus ex machina intervenes, to the tune of “Camptown Races.”

  As the laughter subsided, Wendy connected Medea to her own mother, Lola, about whom, she said, she was writing a play. “When Chris first met my mother, she came dressed as Patty Hearst,” she said. “She had on a little beret and a little toy gun, and she said, ‘Guess who I am?’ ” She read from an essay she’d written about her mother, and then, with a perfect comic pause, she grinned at the audience. “My mother and I go way back. . . .”

  More laughter. She had worked her magic. The audience didn’t seem to see a dumpy woman in her fifties with messy hair and a face that had not borne time well. They were caught up in her playfulness, her ability to turn Greek tragedy into a Jewish-mother joke, making it personal and plausible.

  Chris was on another panel that evening. Afterward he went to his hotel, too tired to attend yet another champagne reception. He saw Wendy again the following morning, when she read from Shiksa Goddess, her collection of essays. After she was finished, he walked her outside, where a car was waiting to take her to her next appointment. She left for New York a few hours later.

  Those few days in Key West were a respite from familial, social, and professional demands. Like Chris, Emmy noticed how unusually relaxed Wendy was. She strolled the quaint streets with Emmy and Lucy, all of them delighted by the chickens that ran wild everywhere. While Wendy worked at the seminar, Emmy and Lucy took an open-air bus tour of the island. Wendy brought them to see Terrence McNally’s house. He wasn’t there, but his housekeeper showed them around. Terrence was one of Lucy’s favorite grown-up friends. Many people had wondered if he was her father, but people were always guessing who Lucy’s father was, and Wendy encouraged the game.

  Amonth later this item was reported in David Patrick Columbia’s Web gossip column, “New York Social Diary”:

  Feb 16, 2005. Leaving “21,” it was impossible to get a cab, so I caught a Fifth Avenue bus down to 23rd Street where I picked up a cab who took me over to costume designer William Ivey Long’s newly restored and refurbished house over by Ninth Avenue in Chelsea. William was giving a book party for his close friend Wendy Wasserstein, the playwright who has just published a book for Oxford University Press called Sloth. One of the Seven Deadly Sins, if you didn’t know—Oxford has published a book by different authors on each one of them. Ms. Wasserstein was assigned the subject, and, as you might imagine, she has a distinctive and get-down take on the subject. To whit [sic]—chapter one is called “The Slot
h Plan” and begins thusly:

  Everyone who holds this book in hand has at some time made a New Year’s resolution to get off the couch and join a gym. People like Jack LaLanne and Arnold Schwarzenegger have made fortunes making every single reader of this book think there is something wrong with his or her horizontal instincts. Instead of eating cold pizza and beer for breakfast, we have all been led to believe we’ d be better off lifting one- and two-hundred pound slabs of iron in rotation. Have you ever been to a penal colony? That’s what insane criminals are forced to do.

  About Long’s house the gossip columnist gushed:

  The top floors were recreated from scratch, including the bathrooms, although it’s hard to believe because it looks and is furnished so authentically mid-Victorian you practically expect Robert Louis Stevenson to emerge from one of the rooms. . . . I saw Terrence McNally and Anna Sui and Betsy and Clifford Ross, Heather Watts, Caroline Kennedy and Ed Schlossberg, Paul Rudnick, Bruce and Claude Wasserstein, Susan Stroman, Frank Rich, Miko [sic] Kakutani, André Bishop, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff, Sonny Mehta, Cathy and Stephen Graham, Carrie Minot, and Rafael Yglesias and dozens more just like them (William’s friends are all William’s fans).

  It all sounds fabulous until the accompanying photographs are deconstructed. There’s Wendy, standing next to Betsy Ross, her friend the fashion specialist. In the photograph Wendy’s right eye is closed and her smile weirdly frozen, a frank record of the recurrence of Bell’s palsy. Her sweater is askew; it might be Chanel, but brand-conscious Wendy never lost her habit of making expensive clothes look like someone else’s castoffs.

  Her friendship with William Ivey Long had resumed officially in 2001, when Shiksa Goddess was published. William threw that book party, too. Ken Cassillo remembered going to the Shiksa Goddess party with butterflies in his stomach, thinking, “This is going to be a toxic event.” Instead it was just like old times. After all the celebrated friends left that night, Cassillo, Angela Trento, and Cindy Tolan remained with Wendy and William, drinking wine and laughing.