It’s the birthday of *yet another* playwright, Wendy Wasserstein (1950-2006), who lived longer than Oscar Wilde but not nearly as long as Arthur Miller, and who is best known for her play The Heidi Chronicles (1988), which won the Pulitzer, the New York Critics’ Circle Award, and the Tony for Best Play—the first solo female playwright to receive the Tony.

Wasserstein was born in Brooklyn, New York, the youngest of five in a family riddled with wild success and disturbing secrets. (Buckle your seat belts.) Secret #1: Wasserstein’s mother, Lola, was originally married to Wasserstein’s father’s older brother and had two children with him; when he died, she married his younger brother Morris and had the other three children and then just never mentioned that first husband to the kids. (Sure, I can see how that might not come up…) Secret #2: the family also never talked about the eldest of the five children, who had a fever when he was young, experienced brain damage, and was institutionalized for life. Wasserstein was an adult when she first met this brother: he approached her after a lecture, introduced himself, and asked, “Why am I stuck in this home?”

Lola’s children also experienced the cognitive dissonance of a mother who thought they were superior to all other children, and yet somehow never ever good enough. (Thanks, Mom!) Morris was the more unconditionally loving parent; their marriage succeeded in part because he turned down his hearing aid when he needed a break. All of this family dysfunction was great material for Wasserstein’s work, which focused on liberated women who were both overburdened by responsibilities and desperately isolated. Wasserstein, who studied at Mount Holyoke College and then Yale Drama School (her mother hoped she’d meet a lawyer there and get married), began having plays produced in the 70s and became well-established with Uncommon Women and Others in 1977. Isn’t It Romantic followed in 1981 and of course The Heidi Chronicles, which follows the life of a woman from high school through her career as an art historian 20 years later, concluding with her decision to have a child on her own.

Wasserstein herself made that same decision, after many years of unsatisfying or no romantic relationships: she had a daughter at 48, never revealing the father’s identity. Just seven years later, Wasserstein died of complications from lymphoma. In 2011, Julie Salamon published a biography of Wasserstein (see a review of that bio here), Wendy and the Lost Boys. Wasserstein had written a total of 11 plays (including The Sisters Rosensweig, 1992) as well as screenplays, essays, and a single novel, Elements of Style (2006), a comedy about the Manhattan elite in a post-911 world.

Have a beautiful Thursday, for goodness’ sake tell any children you happen to have that they are wonderful, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.