Weather 
There are some playwrights who get a play open and leave it behind, while there are others who are always iterating a work. Wendy Wasserstein was in the latter group. Well after shows had opened, she was thinking of ways to tinker with them, whether she would actually execute the change or not. In a 1995 interview, published in The Playwright’s Art: Conversations with Contemporary American Dramatists, she stated that it was important for her to get a play out to someone once she finished a first draft or else she would never have any plays produced, but rather have “five plays that nobody ever saw that were rewritten twenty-seven times.” So, when I heard the La Femme Theatre Productions team was sorting through eight different versions of An American Daughter for the non-profit’s off-Broadway revival of the play, I was not surprised. This is especially so because it was well-known that the critical reception to the brief 1997 Broadway mounting of An American Daughter upset her.
“It’s difficult for an author to say exactly what her play is about,” she explained in the preface to the 1998 Harcourt Brace & Company published edition of the play. “That’s better left to audiences and drama critics. Some critics decided that my play was about far too much. Was it about politics? Was it an attack on the media? Was it about women? Frankly, I believe that the major events of a person’s life are seldom about ‘one thing.'”
She noted that the one major female critic, Linda Winer, gave it a positive review, but men did not: “For many women An American Daughter wasn’t about too many things; it was, rather, about the thing. But to some men, and many critics, it seemed the rantings of a comedic writer trying to find something ‘important’ to say.”
An American Daughter was the most overtly political of Wasserstein’s plays. Inspired by Clinton nominees Zoe Baird, Kimba Wood, and Lani Guinier—who all withdrew their names from consideration after negative publicity—the play centers on Dr. Lyssa Dent Hughes, a health care expert and the daughter of a longtime U.S. Senator, who has been nominated for Surgeon General. Minor dirt on her comes to light, the media gets involved, and she must decide whether to fight or drop out. Personal politics of course come into play as much as partisan ones, in a way that would not happen if the central character was male. It is a plot that one would hope would be dated 30 years after it was written, but it is sadly not. Yet An American Daughter is rarely produced. (Mandy Greenfield, then Williamstown Theatre Festival artistic director, smartly programmed it in 2016, a year when sexism in politics was taking center stage, but that is the last major regional mounting I recall.)
Despite the fact that La Femme Theatre Productions is dedicated to telling women’s stories, it did not even immediately occur to Executive Director Jean Lichty that it was a play the company should do. After Kamala Harris’ loss, she wanted something political. She did a reading of Tennessee Williams’ Camino Real, which is neither written by a woman nor prominently telling a women’s story. (She had wanted to make the character of Kilroy a woman, but advisory board member Austin Pendleton nixed it.) Then, advisory board member and attorney Ben Feldman suggested An American Daughter. Lichty read the Harcourt Brace version and wanted to do it, but her board took a couple of readings to convince. Along the way, others told her that Wasserstein kept working on the play, and Lichty should explore the other versions of it as well.
They ended up with eight versions: the pre-Broadway version from a workshop series in Seattle (starring Meryl Streep), the Broadway version, the Dramatists Play Service version, the Harcourt Brace version, a version from a 1998 mounting with Chicago’s Organic Theater Company, a version from a 1999 Long Wharf Theatre production, the teleplay from the 2000 Lifetime movie version, and the script from the 2003 Arena Stage mounting. Playwright Jenny Lyn Bader, who was once Wasserstein’s assistant, Chicago mounting director Ina Marlowe, script supervisor Will DeVary (who is also in the production), and former Arena artistic director Molly Smith (who just happens to also be a La Femme advisory board member) helped gather the scripts.
“I loved the second act of the Chicago version, some people don’t think it’s that different, but I do,” Lichty, who is also appearing in the La Femme mounting, said. “It ends with the two women, the two best friends, Judith and Lyssa. Whereas in all the other versions, with her right before the end is one of the men, the husband or her father.”
Lichty, DeVary and Director Sarna Lapine all came up with the production draft. The first act is primarily the one from the Broadway version and the second act is primarily the one from Chicago. But the team also “Frankenstein-ed it a bit,” including inserting lines from other versions, or moving things around in accordance with how they were in other versions. The estate, with co-executor Andre Bishop acting as the point person, has to approve all changes. Before rehearsals started, the La Femme team went back and forth a little with the estate. And, as they were changing things during rehearsals, Bishop was on the daily reports so he could review and approve or reject any changes quickly. It is all Wasserstein’s words, just, as Lichty put it, “patched together a bit differently.”
“My personal opinion, and I think Sarna agrees with this, is, as time went on, Wendy tried to make it more palatable and not embrace her anger at the way professional women have been treated,” Lichty said. “The earlier versions don’t shy away from that. They have the great craft of Wendy, but also some of her anger.”
Throughout the process, Lichty, who admits she previously did not know much about Wasserstein’s work, has become a huge fan, noting the intentionality of every line, and calling Wasserstein “prescient” and “so smart.” She told me she did not understand why Wasserstein “went into disrepute.” Because, for a long time, Wasserstein was the playwright every female playwright held up as an example. In her Tony acceptance speech for Liberation, Bess Wohl pointed out she was the first American woman playwright in almost 40 years to win the Best Play award, the last one being “Wendy Wasserstein for her brilliant play, Heidi Chronicles.”
The Broadway revival of Heidi failed though and, even before that, there was a feeling Wasserstein’s work was showing its age. The revival amplified that perception, as did the change in regional theaters throughout the country. Theaters that had built their reputation on Wasserstein productions began to produce newer work, leaving fewer eyeballs on her plays. Lichty hopes between her revival, and Wohl’s mention, perhaps attention will again be paid to Wasserstein’s catalog. (The Sisters Rosensweig seems particularly ripe for a revival.)
Only time will tell whether this An American Daughter finally achieves the critical validation Wasserstein so wanted. It’s not that the later versions that existed before now did it. Some mountings received more respect than the Broadway version, but the play was never truly embraced. The Arena version, for example, received a dismissive review from Peter Marks at The Washington Post, which, according to Lichty, stuck with director Smith and Wasserstein.
However, there is hope for this new mounting. It certainly has a solid cast. In addition to Lichty and DeVary, the production’s cast includes Montego Glover, Robert Sean Leonard, Dakin Matthews, Mary Beth Peil, Ryan Spahn, Chris Ghaffari, and Carmen Zilles. And it has been selling very well. But the critics are still weeks away—the opening is August 11. (In this environment, just which shows get a review by who is more up-in-the-air than ever; nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that there are now more major female critics than there were when An American Daughter was last here.)
There is definitely something fitting about a well-known rewriter being rewritten even after her death. She certainly would have appreciated striving for something better.
“I have a theory about writing for the theater,” Wasserstein wrote in the American Daughter preface. “If you aim for a six and get a six, you’ll do fine. If you aim for a ten and get a six, or even an eight, you won’t do well at all. But I believe the purpose of writing plays, or practicing any art form, is to try for a ten every time.”
