By Wendy Wasserstein
A group of women friends reminisce about their college dreams to “have it all”
Department of Theatre & Drama
Arthur Miller Theatre
November 19-22, 2009
Overview
The Story: In a New York restaurant around 1977, five college friends from Mount Holyoke College reunite to catch up. As they bring each other up to date, they revisit, in flashbacks, episodes from their senior year at college. Caught between traditionalist notions of womanhood and the novel feminist idea of unlimited opportunity, graduation forced each woman to make a choice that would determine their role in the world. Now six years later, with humorous banter and sober apprehension, the friends wonder if they have met their youthful expectations to be “uncommon” and where their lives as friends and individuals will take them.
Artistic Significance: Written in 1977 as her graduate thesis for The Yale School of Drama, Uncommon Women and Others would launch Wendy Wasserstein as one of the most influential, sharply comedic, and successful woman playwrights of our time. Before her untimely death in 2006, Wasserstein continued to write wryly-observant plays about the lives of contemporary women in The Heidi Chronicles (1989 Tony Award, Pulitzer Prize for Drama), The Sisters Rosenzweig, and An American Daughter. Uncommon Women, which made its debut at the Pheonix Theatre Off Broadway and was later filmed for PBS, featured actresses who would become stars of their generation – Glenn Close, Swoozie Kurtz, Jill Eikenberry, and Meryl Streep. Full of wit, optimism, frank sexual expression (considered shocking for the time), and insight, Uncommon Women and Others tackles the excitement and anxiety of having overwhelming choices.
Cast
Narrator Ray Rabidoux
Kate Quin Emily Berman
Samantha Stewart Quinn Scillian
Holly Kaplan Laura Lapidus
Muffet Di Nicola Bridget Coyne Gabbe
Rita Altabel Elly Jarvis
Mrs. Plumm Janet Maylie*
Susie Friend Bonnie Gruesen
Carter Stephanie Williams
Leilah Devin Lytle
* Ms. Maylie appears by permission of Actors’ Equity Association, the union of professional Actors and Stage Managers in the United States.
