A witness for women of our time

In the first five minutes of “The Heidi Chronicles,” the play that won Wendy Wasserstein the 1989 Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize, a teenage Heidi Holland turns down an invitation to dance with the student council president. Sorry, she says. She can’t leave her girlfriend.

Women friends and colleagues were crucial to Heidi and to Wasserstein, who died this week at 55 of lymphoma. From “Uncommon Women and Others” in 1977 through last year’s “Third,” the playwright thrust often-ignored, smart, contemporary women into the theatrical mainstream.

“Wendy was writing for and about women with a real resonance for our time,” says Jane Alexander, former chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Arts. “She was always very au courant, and I think that made her writing very accessible. She was one of the brightest lights on Broadway and will be deeply, deeply missed.”

For actress Alexander, there will also be a professional void. Wasserstein will no longer be around to craft characters like Sara Goode, the investment broker Alexander played in “The Sisters Rosensweig” on Broadway in 1993, or Laurie Jameson, the professor Dianne Wiest created at New York’s Lincoln Center Theater last fall in “Third.”

“I am deeply saddened by the loss of Wendy,” says Joan Allen, who originated the role of Heidi on Broadway. “She captured the experiences of so many women in “The Heidi Chronicles,” and I was honored to have been the first actress to share her vision with the world.”

An impressive roster of actresses has shared that vision. Jamie Lee Curtis, Amy Irving and Mary McDonnell also took a turn as Heidi on Broadway and elsewhere, while Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Frances McDormand, Mary Beth Hurt, Cynthia Nixon, Sarah Jessica Parker and Lynne Thigpen have portrayed other Wasserstein women onstage. Jennifer Aniston played the lead in Wasserstein’s 1998 film adaptation of Stephen McCauley’s novel “The Object of My Affection.”

“Wendy had a way of capturing all the questions, frustrations and humor of trying to deal with being smart women in our society,” says JoBeth Williams, who played Sara in the L.A. Theatre Works recording of “The Sisters Rosensweig.” “I loved the different female voices she gave to us and we as actresses got to portray. I think there are a lot of sad actresses who would like to have played more of her parts and seen where she would have gone in her later years.”

Much as her wacky grin, girlish giggles and persistent wit afforded her privacy in conversation and interviews, Wasserstein’s one-liners and other shtick often camouflaged the seriousness of her plays. “As an actress, you realized there was something weighty going on all the time,” observes Caroline Aaron, whose list of Wasserstein characters includes sister Gorgeous Teitelbaum in the 1994 Los Angeles production of “Sisters Rosensweig.” “There is nothing trivial about her characters’ issues, but their problems or points of view are always served up with humor.”

“Uncommon Women,” Wasserstein’s memoir of life at Mount Holyoke College, began as a one-act she wrote while at Yale School of Drama, Wasserstein told The Times, because she wanted to see an all-women curtain call in the school’s basement. Developed in various workshops, her Yale graduate thesis opened off-Broadway in November 1977 with a cast that included Close, Jill Eikenberry and Swoosie Kurtz. (In a later PBS rebroadcast, Close was replaced by Wasserstein’s Yale classmate Streep.)

As far back as the play’s first workshop, recalls Kurtz, Wasserstein was a skilled writer and problem solver. “Rita was a great role -- this character just flew off the stage,” says Kurtz. “And Wendy was a very fast rewriter. She’d go away for half an hour and come back with stacks of new pages. She was so prolific. We can only imagine what she would have gone on to write.”

Male actors too say they relished Wasserstein lines. “If you have a dumb villain or antagonist, it isn’t much for the protagonist to hit up against,” observes Peter Friedman, who portrayed irresistible scoundrel Scoop Rosenbaum in “The Heidi Chronicles” on Broadway. “But if you make them as sharp as your main character, you have fireworks. For nine months in 1988, I felt charismatic and witty, and I loved it.”

Wasserstein’s experiences with cancer, maybe her own but surely her older sister Sandra’s, featured prominently in her last play, “Third.” Yet through rehearsals and performances last fall, Wasserstein never let on that she was in pain or limited in any way, says actress Amy Aquino, who played Nancy. “Looking back on conversations about my character, who was fighting a recurrence of cancer, I think Wendy was first and foremost protecting us from feeling bad, because we would have been devastated. But she also would not have wanted anything to intrude on or limit our digging deep into the work and really shaping it.”

Aquino speaks of reconnecting this week with other actors who performed in Wasserstein’s plays, and she is not alone. Aaron sent out e-mail invitations to friends and colleagues, urging that they send them on to other “Wendy people” who might find comfort in gathering at Aaron’s Los Angeles home tonight.

“There will be a big memorial for Wendy in New York at a later date, but I thought for right now, right this minute, we should all have a chance to be together to cherish her,” Aaron says. “As she said in ‘The Heidi Chronicles,’ ‘Your friends are your family.’ ”