Wendy Wasserstein dead from lymphoma at 55

[swag]

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/13748036.htm

Wendy Wasserstein, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who turned the concerns of her generation's women into laughter-laced dramatic art, died Monday in New York, according to the Lincoln Center Theater. She was 55 and had been in a long, quiet battle with cancer.

André Bishop, Lincoln Center Theatre's artistic director, said Wasserstein suffered from lymphoma.
Wasserstein plumbed her own life and those of her bright Mount Holyoke College classmates for her first New York success, Uncommon Women and Others. Then, as she and they began to face myriad issues both personal (marriage, career, motherhood, beauty, weight) and societal (feminism, politics, anti-Semitism, the media), Wasserstein's subsequent characters also reflected those choices and struggles, in plays like Isn't It Romantic?, The Heidi Chronicles, The Sisters Rosensweig and An American Daughter.

Wasserstein was born into a successful, driven Jewish family in Brooklyn in 1950. Her father Morris was in textiles (and, his daughter said, invented velveteen); her mom Lola was a sometime dancer and once-and-forever Jewish mother, a woman who sat at the Sisters Rosensweig opening night celebration and observed, after one of the playwright's pals pronounced the party wonderful, ``Yes, but wouldn't it be nicer if this were Wendy's wedding?''

One of four children, Wasserstein got an upper-class Manhattan education after the family moved there when she was 12. All of her siblings were successful. Sisters Sandra Meyer (who headed corporate affairs for Citicorp and died of breast cancer in 1997) and Georgette ''Gorgeous'' Levis (who runs a Vermont bed-and-breakfast with her psychiatrist husband) were the basis for two of the three sisters in the Chekhov-inspired Sisters Rosensweig (the other was a version of Wendy herself). Brother Bruce Wasserstein is an investment banker, corporate takeover specialist and chairman of the company that publishes New York Magazine. And her cousin, Leslie Moonves, is head of CBS Television.

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[flamingyouth]

1. Sad.

I had heard she was sick. I enjoyed her work. :(

[progmom]

2. oh shit.

i loved her. :cry:

[wildhorses]

3. sorry to hear this

my condolences to her family

[latebloomer]

4. How tragic

She had a 7-year-old daughter who she adopted.

[swag]

5. ;