A Study Of Wendy Wasserstein's Woman-Conscious Comedies

Wendy Wasserstein is one of the most popular and admirable contemporary American playwrights. Since the 1970s she has shown deep concern in her plays about anxiety and confusion of the baby boom generation of American women who were struggling with self-definition in a transitional social stage when traditional values were competing with feminist ideals. Despite her persistent attention to feminist issues in her plays, Wasserstein is a controversial figure due to her ambivalence towards feminism.Wasserstein's studies are usually focused on her themes, trying to sort out her political stance through the subject matter of her plays. However, this thematic approach proves to be unfruitful, because these studies largely neglect the comedic form that Wasserstein employs in playwriting. From the standpoint of comedy, this study of Wasserstein's plays attempts to answer two questions:How does Wasserstein make use of comic possibilities to address contemporary women's issues? And how does the comic spirit influence her understanding of and reflection on feminism? This dissertation reveals that the significance of Wasserstein's plays lies in two transgressions:the transgression of comic conventions to accommodate women's issues, and the transgression of the tragic view of self-construction pervasive in the radical feminist theater.Chapter One examines the "battle of sexes" motif in the Western male comedy tradition through some representative pieces of works. It reveals that comedic license provides a space for female empowerment on the comedic stage, but this empowerment is usually dissolved by comedy's utopian nature and a genre-bound happy ending. The fact is that comedy that truly configures a woman's identity and desire is severely lacking in this tradition.Chapter Two is an exploration of Wasserstein's episodic comedic structure. It argues that while most comedies are written in a "teleological" structure, Wasserstein's comedic structure is a "dialectical" structure emphasizing contests of ideas rather than unity of plot. This loosely-plotted dialectical structure facilitates Wasserstein's employment of an emotional structure that balances the comic and the sad, which not only gives a psychological dimension to the plays, but also breaks the utopian nature of comedy. It also allows an open ending that embodies a comic spirit of hope and possibility for contemporary women.Chapter Three is focused on Wasserstein's characterization of contemporary women in her plays. It is noteworthy that characterization of women on conventional comic stage hardly goes beyond several stereotypes, but what Wasserstein wants to represent on stage is a group of women that she can identify with. Wasserstein's characterization of contemporary women alludes to conventional comic types, but she also manages to transform comic female characters by injecting into them a high self-consciousness, a reflective spirit and a strong sense of survival with hopes and possibilities. They transform from tragic heroines to comic heroines who are heroic in a comic sense.Chapter Four examines the influence of the idea of comedy, namely the comic spirit, on Wasserstein's thematic concern for contemporary American women's self-construction. Feminist theater has for a long time been dominated by three types of tragic self:the split self, the synecdochic self and the collective self. The tragic self is idealistic and heroic yet isolated. Wasserstein's comic self is a resilient and elastic self capable of change and adjustment. Wasserstein's plays show a thematic pattern that the tragic self transforms into the comic self. This pattern embodies Wasserstein's comic spirit.Like most women playwrights, Wasserstein mixes women's issues and social criticism in her theater, but in a theatrical style that differs greatly from the radical feminist theater. For Wasserstein the comic spirit is a philosophy of life that can help women deal with difficulties. In her view, there is no use for women to stick to the apologist tone and the victimized position. To argue that women are pathetic and there is no way out for them is nothing but another ideology imposed on women. Comedy not only works as a liberating force for her female characters, but also works as a celebration of a belief in life's possibilities and humanity.