In Search Of Self

No woman playwright has had more plays presented on Broadway than Wendy Wasserstein, whose stage success has won her honorable titles of "one of the leading female voices on the contemporary stage," "the voice of her generation," and "one of America's finest playwrights at the turn of century." Wasserstein's theatrical achievement, however, does not win immediate critical success. Male critics keep their distance because of her "consciousness of women as women." While performance reviews are many, scholarly criticism is scarce. Within the feminist theatre camp, critics contradict and even disagree with each other on the evaluation of Wasserstein's work because of her dramatization of a group of women from a fairly narrow racial, sexual and economic stratum. They even go so far as to be divided on the basic question whether Wasserstein should be included within the camp, and be referred to as a feminist playwright or not. Beyond this, feminist critics also hold divided opinions about Wasserstein's comic inclination. While some insist that comedy is incompatible with feminism, that "Mask of Humor" only diffuses the plays' thematic and theoretical gravity, some contend it not only helps muster up courage, it is also capable of fighting.The embarrassing situation that the criticism of Wasserstein finds itself in, as the dissertation demonstrates, points to a problem of primary significance, a problem with which feminist theorists are confronted at the emergence of feminism but remains unsatisfactorily resolved till today, which is also the problem that confuses and frustrates both Wasserstein and her women characters, and takes the playwright's whole life to tackle, but is inadequately studied and explored by critics, namely, the problem of female identity. A playwright who is determined to dramatize women's pain as women, Wasserstein stands largely as an outsider on Broadway who believes that "the pain in the world is a man's pain." But the great success she meets with in mainstream commercial theatres seemingly makes her marginal position very precarious. Not surprisingly, Wasserstein refers to herself as a humanist despite her plays testify a definite feminist sensitivity and sensibility. Nevertheless, when under violent attack launched by feminist theatre critics, she defends furiously that she is a feminist. Disapproving the label of "The New Woman Playwright," Wasserstein at the same time concedes when she listens to her plays she still thinks, "A woman wrote this." The case that Wasserstein switches from one identity to another actually reveals to a certain extent the essence of her philosophy of women's self-identity, which, as...