10.+Wasserstein

//Please discuss this statement in GROUP 2 discussions ONLY.//
Jill Dolan (Princeton University)

=Wendy Wasserstein's //An American Daughter//=



Wasserstein’s play //An American Daughter//, which premiered on Broadway in 1997, is probably her most effective in terms of addressing national issues and melding them with personal questions about identity. Its politics and theatrical form fit comfortably into a liberal feminist canon. Although the play maintains the wry, comic tone and socially acute, witty observations for which Wasserstein was known, its more sober aspect concerns women’s ability to achieve social status and political power according to rules that seem written to exclude them.

In the play, Lyssa Dent Hughes is a wealthy, highly educated professional woman vying to be nominated by the Clinton-like president as his Surgeon General. Lyssa’s father is a famous US Senator, and her husband is a much-published, often-quoted sociology professor. Although Lyssa’s own achievements are equally impressive, she’s sandwiched between the patriarch and the husband, both of whom accrue power and status without working nearly as hard as Lyssa. Wasserstein uses this gender triangle in many of her plays, most famously in //The Heidi Chronicles//’s “Hello New York” scene, in which Heidi sits between her friends Scoop and Peter on a talk show host’s couch and watches silently while they send their verbal volleys over her head, preempting her remarks every time she begins to speak. In //Heidi//, both Scoop and Peter love and even more or less respect Heidi, but when it comes to public preening, Wasserstein shrewdly demonstrates how they revert to the old entitlements of male privilege that blind them to how they’re erasing her.

Lyssa, likewise, is subtly overshadowed by her father and essentially undone by her husband. Although Lyssa is clearly the best candidate for Surgeon General, her husband inadvertently sabotages her nomination by relating to a reporter profiling her in anticipation of her “compromise nomination” an anecdote about a jury summons Lyssa failed to answer. The reporter feels ethically bound to report her indiscretion, and the predatory media contrive the honest oversight to seem a careless exercise of class presumption and a criminal neglect of her civic duty. In the spin cycle that follows, Lyssa’s husband Walter encourages her to bend to public opinion, to be contrite, and to compromise her ideals to return to favor, an assault to her integrity she’s unable to withstand. Finally, even though Lyssa’s credentials are impeccable and she’s an impassioned advocate, especially for the once again timely issue of women’s health, the presumption that her class status helped her avoid a civic responsibility makes her nomination too distasteful to go forward. Lyssa is left at home, in the domestic space in which the story resolutely, emphatically takes place, entering chat rooms to talk about health care while her two young never seen sons chatter to her from offstage.

//An American Daughter// finds its inspiration in the gendered betrayals of Clinton administration-era political duplicity. Lyssa’s dilemma mirrors the Zoë Baird and Kimba Wood “Nannygate” cases, in which these two early nominees for Attorney General were both disgraced by the press when background checks revealed they’d employed undocumented domestic workers. Wasserstein’s heroine finds her own potential similarly compromised by how a common upper-class practice or a rather quotidian mistake becomes a national outrage. As in the real historical examples, Lyssa finds the fictional president who nominated her unwilling to step up to support her candidacy, despite their warm private friendship. Wasserstein’s plot also recalls the Lani Guinier case, in which Clinton nominated an old Yale classmate with whom he’d long been friendly to head the Civil Rights Commission, only to back away from her politically when the media dubbed her the “quota queen” and smeared her public image. By modeling the play’s plot of so closely on these real and then recent political examples, Wasserstein clearly intends to offer an alternative reading of what happened to these women, resolutely looking at the events from Lyssa’s perspective and tracking the private devastation wrought by her public ruin. That Lyssa’s misdemeanors echo real events affords Wasserstein a fairly obvious structure on which to hang a discussion about women and power, the corruption of the media, and the callowness of the American federal government, but Wasserstein sorts through its many layers in a way the mainstream media failed to do when the nominations pressured Clinton’s administration.

Wasserstein’s play also sets feminist generations against one another, exploring how history has changed the meaning of women’s political alliances. Quincy Quince, Walter’s former student, is the author of //The Prisoner of Gender//, a bestseller of the post-feminist generation. She’s a self-appointed pundit who uses the occasion of Lyssa’s troubles to self-promote her way into a regular spot on //Time Zone//, the show on which Lyssa’s fate is eventually sealed. Wasserstein positions Quincy (whose name is gender-free, patrician, and ultimately conformist, a cookie-cutter name for an unoriginal woman with public pretensions) as the voice of the next feminist generation, the one that still has a critique of gender, but who use it as a commodity on the marketplace of ideas. In contrast, the play’s older women, Lyssa and her good friend, Judith, espouse their beliefs with passion and commitment, and understand in a more material, experiential way how feminist ideology affects real women’s lives. Lyssa is a figurehead to Quincy and little more—she’s her meal ticket to a seat of authority at the table of public opinion created and manipulated by the media.

Lyssa’s friend Judith Kaufman is an oncologist who also specializes in women’s health, who has known Lyssa since their finishing school days at Miss Porter’s (which Lyssa must disguise as something more generic than private and privileged in her TV interview). Judith is African American and Jewish, quite a burden of representation for one character to bear. As originally played by the wonderful, late Lynne Thigpen, the character managed to have some heft, but on the page, she carries the liberal comedy and sometimes becomes the butt of it herself. She always enters the stage through the garden, chiding Lyssa and Walter for leaving the gate open and inviting trouble from the “schvartzes”—the Yiddish word for “dark” that’s a colloquialism for African Americans—and other potential ruffians. One of the play’s ironies is that trouble doesn’t in fact come in through the open gate, but is always already there, in the family and its company, circulating in dominant ideology just waiting for its chance to land on someone who wants to promote change.

That is, Lyssa’s nomination isn’t sabotaged from without; it’s destroyed from within, by Lyssa’s husband and her gay male friend. The play’s bitter medicine is that Lyssa and Judith are forced to try to make change in the health care system off the nation’s most public stages. In the end, Lyssa understands that she does the most good in her own smaller sphere of influence, but Wasserstein’s deep regret is that her character and women like her are kept out of a wider, more influential public sphere for reasons that have nothing to do with their qualifications and everything to do with skewed public perception wrought by the media’s manipulation of their class status and their gender.