The American Century: Literature since 1945 697While Simon has continued to see many of his later plays, like The Dinner Party
(2000) and 45 Seconds from Broadway (2001), produced on Broadway, one result of
the exponential growth in other theatrical arenas in America has been the increase
in the production of plays by writers from previously marginalized groups. Notable
here is the emergence of many women playwrights, including Marsha Norman
(1947–), Wendy Wasserstein (1950–2006), and Beth Henley (1952–). Norman saw
her first play, Getting Out (1977), produced in Louisville, Kentucky; other, later plays
include Circus Valentine (1979) and The Hold-Up (1980). But it is ‘night, Mother
(1982) that has brought her her greatest success so far. At the center of the play is a
woman in her forties, Jessie Cates, who tells her mother that she plans to commit
suicide. Resisting every attempt her mother makes to dissuade her, she outlines her
reasons for killing herself. “I’m just not having a very good time,” she explains, “and
I don’t have any reason to think it’ll get anything but worse.” ‘night, Mother is not so
much about the ethics of suicide, as about the right of the individual to control her
own destiny. After forty or so years, Jessie is taking control of her life. “It’s all I really
have that belongs to me and I’m going to say what happens to it,” she says. Her
mother can finally do no more than acknowledge her right to make her decision:
“Forgive me,” she declares, “I thought you were mine.” In all this, ‘night, Mother is
very much in the American grain. Very much in the Southern grain, by contrast, are
the plays of Beth Henley, her most notable being Crimes of the Heart (1979) and The
Miss Firecracker Contest (1981). The women who dominate her work offer persuasive
variations on the Southern grotesque. Simultaneously feisty and fantastic, bold and
bizarre, they tend to see life askew and respond to events in a quirky way that hardly
distinguishes between the serious and the trivial. Their quirkiness turns out to be a
survival technique, however. “But, Babe, we’ve just got to learn how to get through
these real bad days here,” one woman in Crimes of the Heart explains, “I mean, it’s
getting to be a thing in our family.” And their oddness, their often freakish humor, is
clearly how they learn to get through.
Survival is also an issue at the heart of the plays of Wendy Wasserstein. In
Uncommon Women and Others (1977), Isn’t It Romantic? (1983), The Heidi
Chronicles (1988), and Third (2005), Wasserstein took as her subject her own
generation of women, shaped by the feminist aspirations of the 1970s. Uncommon
Women, for example, explores the lives of a group of ambitious young women in
an exclusive college. They receive ambiguous messages about their destiny from
their teachers, their family, and society. Told that “today all fields are open to
women,” they are nevertheless also advised that they can achieve what they want
“without loss of gaiety, charm or femininity” – and offered courses in gracious
domestic living. Confused by these messages, they pursue different destinies, none
of which seems entirely satisfactory or fulfilling. One woman retreats into dreams
of an ideal mate, another into mindless domesticity; one becomes a professional,
but still feels suppressed and thwarted – “Just once it would be nice to wake up
with nothing to prove,” she confesses. In a concluding section some six years after
the main action, these “uncommon women” are still trying to find ways of achieving
and expressing their uncommonness, their difference from the norm prescribedGGray_c05.indd 697ray_c 05 .indd 697 8 8/1/2011 7:31:39 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 39 PM