A friend, who called it "a page-turner," gave me this book. We both worked on the Playwrights Horizons production of "Isn't It Romantic," and also with many of the theatre people who populate the book, so for us, it definitely was. Contrasting the private Wasserstein with the public Wasserstein, the book reveals an ambitious, talented, driven, social woman who defied uppercrust conventions in her appearance, but was buffeted about privately by traditional societal expectations of family life and stalked by tragedy. It does not sufficiently convey how funny she could be. The quote most interesting to me was from John Lyons, the one-time literary manager, who said that if Playwrights had received blind submissions of a Noel Coward play and a Sam Shepard play, the Noel Coward would be the one that would have been produced. Aha! The rich and privileged do think different from you and me. ( )

[from my extended blog post at: http://wp.me/pHkrs-1tM]

Wendy and the Lost Boys: The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein (2011) by Julie Salamon weaves and wanders and quotes and alludes and does all the superficial things a biography is meant to do. It is well-organized, cited and indexed. People are quoted, apparently many years were spent in reading and interviewing, and the outlines of a brief life (1950-2006) are presented. One does not doubt the amount of the researching effort. What one does not glean, however, in the reading of the biography supposedly informed by all of this research is the heart of the woman at the center, the heart of the plays and essays and other writings that are her legacy. I doubt the author’s ability to assess Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning Wasserstein’s work, and I question the facile connect-the-dots association of individuals to conversations and life events that largely defines what counts as play and book analysis of the work of Wendy Wasserstein and of other artists throughout this book. One doesn’t have to love the subject of one’s work, I suppose, but at minimum I have expectations for the tools used to analyze the art that is produced during the life of a person studied in a biography. Salamon comes up short. And Wasserstein as an artist and as a person deserves better.

Sharing a world view or a life experience or an era with the book’s subject is not sufficient for a positive assessment of this book for me. I am a late-era Baby Boomer who came along in the Ivy League and in personal life and career decision-making about 10 years after Wasserstein. I relate on many levels and share many beliefs and learn from her characters specifically and her art generally. I am a feminist fan of her writing of women weaving lives through cultural expectations and personal priorities, have been eager to learn more about her life, and I am thrilled that a woman of my generation to whom I can strongly relate and who I admire is receiving this biographical treatment. My remarks are not to be construed as a commentary on the life lived. It is the murky telling in this biographical journey with which I struggle.

Over and over and over the biographer cites individuals who report intense and important friendships with Wasserstein and yet Salamon is not able to provide a sense of who Wasserstein is — why people are so drawn to her. In part I fault biographer’s art itself gone awry — confusing juxtapositions of events and dates so that you don’t know WHERE you are in the course of a single page. We are told the story at times, it feels, in the order in which the biographer learned the details rather than resorted to actually tell the story of a life. More glaringly and pervasively, often the focus is profoundly on the people in Wasserstein’s orbit, her friends of the theatre, rather than Wasserstein herself — she fades away. The informant’s perspective is allowed to lead the narrative. And most profoundly problematic to the theatre lover in me — what this biography fails to reflect is the joy of her art, the joy in her art, the romance of the theatre, her joy in living,

[and finally]
In conclusion, I offer an attempt to allow Wasserstein’s enchantment with the magic of theatre and her sense of whimsy to speak for themselves in a way that this biographer avoids. Salamon indicates that Wasserstein published a children’s book about the musical theatre in addition to plays and journalism in the 1990s with a summary dismissal. ”Besides this journalistic output, in 1996 she published Pamela’s First Musical, an illustrated children’s book in which an Auntie Mame type introduces her niece to Broadway musicals. She dedicated the book to her niece Pamela, Bruce’s oldest child, who was then a senior at Dalton.” That barebones assessment of this poem of joy to the theatre misses the point of the exercise. This piece may have been written for children but, like Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons of the 1960s and later, the jokes, the references and double entendres and plays on names are meant for adults. I am baffled why Salamon doesn’t take a few moments to enjoy and assign real life human source material to the book’s character names (as she does endlessly with every other piece of writing Wasserstein wrote) such as dancer Nathan Hines Klines and singer Mary Ethel Bernadette and producers Bernie S. Gerry, Margo Dandelion and Andre Cardinal. Most important, Salamon doesn’t share the magic, the impression of this theatre world Wasserstein shares with us through Pamela’s eyes. When nine-year-old Pamela first sees Broadway in all its evening-just-before-curtain wonder we read: “When Pamela first saw Broadway, it looked so exciting she thought she had made it all up.” Those of us who love the theatre felt the same way our first time, Pamela. And after the show and being shown around backstage by connected Aunt Louise, Pamela is introduced to the evocative ghost light. ”As they were leaving the theater, the old stage door man waved to Pamela to come stand onstage in the empty house. ‘This is the ghost light,’ he explained. ‘This means the theater always stays lit for all the people who ever performed here. It also means you can come back anytime.’”

The charm and wonder of those words and images are part of the charm and wonder of this life. In assessing a life such as Wendy Wasserstein’s, I ask that we parse the wit and the wonder as well as the tragedy. At minimum, I ask that we keep the focus on Wendy Wasserstein. And at the same time, come on we can do it, let’s get a sense of the joy of life in there. The material abounds. Let us select with more grace the next time.