© JURGEN FRANK Noted playwright Wendy Wasserstein

In a performance billed as "From Broadway to Hollywood: A conversation with Wendy Wasserstein," MHC's Film Studies Program will present the Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, 1971 graduate of the College, and "satirist of contemporary women's angst" (according to Newsweek) on Friday, September 28, at 7:30 pm in Hooker Auditorium. Thomas Wartenberg, chair of film studies and professor of philosophy, will moderate the event. "We're really lucky to have Wendy come talk to us about her experiences working in film," says Wartenberg. "She has an outsider's perspective on the industry that should make for a fascinating discussion." Wasserstein will sign copies of her new book, Shiksa Goddess, after the talk. The film
The Object of My Affection, for which Wasserstein wrote the screenplay, will be screened on Tuesday, September 25, in room 202 in Skinner Hall at 7 pm.

Wendy Wasserstein was born in Brooklyn and raised in Manhattan, attending a private girls school before coming to Mount Holyoke. While at the College, she majored in history, but it was during her time at MHC that she became seriously interested in writing plays.

After graduation, she returned to New York and studied creative writing at the City College of the City University of New York. Her first play, Any Woman Can't, was produced off-Broadway in 1973 by Playwrights Horizons, a nonprofit theater group. Wasserstein decided to continue her studies at the Yale School of Drama, where she began to collaborate with other new playwrights. She earned her master's degree from Yale in 1976.

Wasserstein's experiences at MHC were the inspiration for her first success, Uncommon Women and Others, a play about eight Mount Holyoke women, which was first produced at Yale and later off-Broadway, and which was adapted by public television in 1978. The PBS cast included Meryl Streep, Swoosie Kurtz, and Jill Eikenberry. The play, written in 1977, won an Obie Award and has been performed by more than 1,000 theater companies. Wasserstein also scored an Off-Broadway success with the long-running comedy Isn't It Romantic (1981).

She has been represented on Broadway with the Playwrights Horizons production of The Heidi Chronicles, the recipient of the 1989 Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and the New York Drama Critics Circle, Drama Desk, and Outer Critic's Circle Awards, and with the Lincoln Center production of The Sisters Rosensweig, a recipient of a 1993 Outer Critic's Circle Award and Tony nomination. An American Daughter, which opened on Broadway in 1997, was nominated for several Tony Awards. In 1993, Wasserstein received the William Inge Award for Distinguished Achievement in American Theater.

Wasserstein's publication credits include a collection of essays, Bachelor Girls (Knopf); The Heidi Chronicles and Other Plays (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich); The Sisters Rosensweig (Harcourt, Brace); and a children's book, Pamela's First Musical (Hyperion). She serves on the Council of the Dramatists Guild, on the board of the British American Arts Association, and on the MacDowell Colony Board. The playwright has taught at Columbia University and New York University and has served as a contributing editor of New York Woman magazine and Harper's Bazaar and is currently a contributing editor of New Woman. Wasserstein wrote the screenplay adaptations for The Heidi Chronicles and The Sisters Rosensweig.

In 1985, the Alumnae Association honored Wasserstein with a Mary Lyon Award, given for outstanding achievement by a young alumna. The College awarded her an honorary doctor of humane letters degree in 1990.