STAGE : Wendy and Her ‘Sisters’ : Playwright Wasserstein survives 40, the Pulitzer and ‘The Heidi Chronicles’ to deliver a new work on family and the passage of time

NEW YORK — It was Yom Kippur, and Wendy Wasserstein was at temple checking out the woman sitting nearby, the one surrounded by her mother and her daughters. The woman, who was about Wasserstein’s age, was all in purple--purple suit, matching high heels, a diamond as big as Bergdorf’s, hair coiffed into a nature-defying confection. “I wondered, ‘Who is this person? Will I ever be her?’ ” Wasserstein said recently. “Will she ever be me?”

Not bloody likely: Wasserstein occupies a singular place in the world, a Pulitzer- and Tony-winning playwright living a life light-years away from the woman sitting next to her in temple. But it’s not surprising she found herself idly trying on someone else’s identity for size: Wasserstein, at 42, is one of the most articulate voices of a generation of women who have found it particularly difficult to figure out who they are. Born too late to surrender their singular dreams to an inevitable domestic avalanche, and too early to take for granted the right to embrace the two, Wasserstein’s characters surf the curl of change in nail-biting, precarious fashion.

In “The Heidi Chronicles,” the 1988 play that won her the Pulitzer and Tony (making her the first woman to do so without a collaborator), Wasserstein explored the wrenching questions that have accompanied these women since their euphoric coming of age in the late ‘60s, as well as the feeling of being “stranded,” as her heroine put it, by the very movement that gave her uncommon women a way out of their own solitude.

Having made themselves up as they went along, they were a generation that embraced friends, the people with whom they invented themselves--not family, the ones who knew where they came from. “The Heidi Chronicles” made Wasserstein famous, a combination Mick Jagger and Joyce Brothers for her generation.

In her new play, “The Sisters Rosensweig,” which opens Thursday at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater, Wasserstein circles back around to that anxiety-ridden question of identity, this time within the daunting shadows that families cast, the ones we come from, the ones we create.

“The Sisters Rosensweig” takes place in London on the lip of the abortive August coup in Russia last year. Sara Rosensweig (Jane Alexander), a formidable banker, the mother of a precocious and beautiful 18-year-old daughter, and a lonely, somewhat embittered divorcee, is turning 54. Her two sisters, Gorgeous Teitelbaum (Madeline Kahn), a 46-year-old Newton, Mass., housewife and radio shrink, and Pfeni (Frances McDormand), a 40-year-old unmarried travel writer, have come to celebrate with her. Also attending Sara’s meticulously prepared dinner party that night are Geoffrey (John Vickery), a theater director and Pfeni’s problematic boyfriend, and Merv (Robert Klein), a “ faux furrier” fresh from a trip to Budapest, Hungary, with the American Jewish Congress.

Now, as it happens, Wasserstein is herself the youngest of three sisters, one of whom is a highly successful corporate executive, the other of whom is called Gorgeous. But as Wasserstein points out, with ineffable good humor for someone who must be sick of these sorts of comparisons, she also has a brother (co-founder of a powerful Wall Street investment banking firm), her sister is nothing like the Gorgeous in the play (“I don’t know where she came from”), and no one in her family lives in London, though Wasserstein herself did, in a cold-water flat with two hot plates and two upside-down flowerpots by way of decoration, while she was writing “The Heidi Chronicles.”

The play is not autobiography, though personal experience of course provided seeds for some of its themes. Sara’s efforts to obliterate her Jewishness, and Merv’s efforts to make her recognize and accept it, for instance, stem from Wasserstein’s own heightened consciousness of her Jewish identity, gleaned from her post-”Heidi” travels abroad.

“I started thinking about the things people say, like: ‘There’s too many Jews in New York’ and ‘Yeah, but they’re really smart,’ ” she says. “In Europe, you feel it (Jewishness) a lot more, you find yourself going into the past.”

And Sara’s wary pas de deux with Merv reflects Wasserstein’s own conviction that romance takes a kind of courage and strength all its own--especially in a culture that tries to deny the possibility of love to women over 35:

“This society would have you believe that after a certain age, a woman is no longer desirable, that you can’t have any love in your life, that after 30, a woman has too much perspective. Part of me thinks, ‘Oh, great, that means I can wear thick white socks and Belle France dresses and be as eccentric as I want to be.’ ”

Still, Wasserstein says, “I wanted to write a lead character who was not a member of my generation and someone who doesn’t end up alone. In (1981’s) ‘Isn’t It Romantic?’ the heroine ends up dancing on the stage alone. In ‘Heidi,’ she ends up having a baby alone. This time I wanted to write a romance. Maybe life will imitate art.”

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These days for Wasserstein, eccentricity has given way to an amiable elegance: dressed in a chic black suit with a touch of velvet at the lapels (in homage, she says, to her father, Morris, a pioneer in velveteen), 40 pounds lighter than she was during her last round of interviews, her brown curls “sun-kissed,” as her hairdresser says, framing a round face creased frequently by a laughter no less genuine for being wielded with a diplomatic and defensive skill bordering on the surgical.

Sara intrigues Wasserstein, she says, but “it’s Geoffrey I’m slowly merging with. I’m between Geoffrey and Gorgeous.” Gorgeous, like the woman in purple, seems a bit of a stretch, a warmhearted, clothes-conscious flibbertigibbet whose blinding wardrobe conceals a shrewd understanding of the human heart. “I’m always interested in what women know,” Wasserstein says. “I think women like Gorgeous know a lot.”

But Geoffrey makes a speech that sounds like a cry from a more personal place. “I wanted to write about time and regret and the theater and one’s feeling about creativity and the desire to be an artist,” Wasserstein says.

As Geoffrey puts it: “I’ve tried for years now to make sense of all this, and all I know is life is random and there is no case to be made for a just and loving God. So then how do we proceed? . . . Of course, we must cherish those that we love. That’s a given. But just as important, people like you and I have to work harder to create the best art, the best theater . . . that we possibly can. And the rest--the children, the country kitchen, the domestic bliss--we leave to others who will have different regrets. Pfeni, you and I can’t idle time.”

Pfeni is the generational signpost in “The Sisters Rosensweig,” 40 years old, never married, torn between her commitment to her writing and the problems of the people she writes about, and her desire for what she also calls “a real life.” It is Pfeni who will strike the most familiar chords to admirers of “The Heidi Chronicles”; in “The Sisters Rosensweig,” Wasserstein takes her character a little further down the road of her dilemmas. Pfeni finds a kind of peace that has more to do with the life she has made for herself than some superimposed idea of what that life is meant to include.

“It took me a long time to write this play,” Wasserstein says. Part of the delay was due to the inevitable pressure of following up a Pulitzer, and part of it was a desire, she says, “to see the world, to see what’s out there.” During that time she traveled--from Timisoara, Romania, to Berlin, from Singapore to Bombay, India, as well as around this country--and she thought about how “there are different lives, and they are all legitimate ones.”

Like Chekhov, whose muse is invoked throughout the play and who, yes, also wrote a play about three sisters, Wasserstein wanted to write a play dealing with “obsessing about time.”

“I wanted to write something about the end of the century when everything was breaking up,” she says. “Setting it at the time of the Russian coup--there was great hopefulness then, before things fell apart.”

Not unlike the ‘60s, come to think of it.

“I also wanted to write about how time has passed and you’re not going to be all those persons you might have been--you have a history, you’ve chosen a road, and yes, you did know what you were doing.”

Wasserstein’s 40th birthday brought her a sigh of relief. For one thing, she could tear up all the lists she had made of the things she had to get done by that dreaded date: lose weight, have a baby, read more, live well, exercise, volunteer. For another, she could say goodby to a lot of people she now would never be.

“We come of age at different times,” she says. “I’m not going to be married at 25 at the Harmony Club. We won’t be little-black-dress people in SoHo.”

But she does at last feel grown-up and, somewhat to her amazement, happy. “The process of doing (“Heidi”) made me feel grounded,” she says. “I thought to myself, ‘We’re these grown-ups and this is what we do.’ I look at Dan (Sullivan, the director), and I think, ‘He’s such a grown-up, I must be one too.’ ”

Though Wasserstein has crossed a number of items off that now crumpled-up list, having a baby isn’t one of them. “I still think about it,” she says. “I know I have to make a decision about that soon.” Pfeni, it is noted, seems to have made her decision on that score. “She’s a little more clear about that than I am,” Wasserstein says.

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Talk of babies recalls the controversy stirred up by the ending to “The Heidi Chronicles,” in which the heroine adopts a baby to raise on her own. Feminist lions like Betty Friedan took Wasserstein to task for implying, in their view, that a woman needs a baby to find happiness.

“That was just one woman’s choice, that was Heidi’s choice,” says Wasserstein, who thought the fracas came about in part because “there are not enough plays about women around” to draw some of the fire, disperse some of the discussion.

Still, the memory widens Wasserstein’s eyes with a thought about what sort of clamor her new play may invoke. “Oh my God!” she says. “Now they’re going to think I want them all to meet furriers.”