Wendy Wasserstein Goes To College
Amherst, Bates, Bennington, Bowdoin, Colby, Dartmouth, Hampshire, Middlebury, Smith, Wellesley, Williams — the names alone conjure up images of that most quintessential of all New England institutions: the liberal arts college. Wendy Wasserstein's remarkable career as a playwright is bookended by two very distinct and wonderful plays that share this same setting.
Starting her career with Uncommon Women and Others, Wendy explores the aspirations and relationships of a group of young women at a college not unlike her own alma mater, Mount Holyoke. Thirty years later she returns to another college setting for Third, where the central character, Professor Laurie Jameson, could easily be one of her "uncommon women" in middle age — more certain of her ideas, but now confronted by a questioning daughter of her own. Ms. Wasserstein expertly uses the liberal arts college setting to explore and question, in a theatrical form, the assumptions we make of ourselves and each other as liberals and conservatives in this cloistered world, and in the world at large.