Award-Winning Playwright Wendy Wasserstein Dead at 55

Award-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein died on Monday, January 30 at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center from complications due to lymphoma, according to a Lincoln Center Theater spokesperson. She was 55.

On December 1 of last year, news broke that Wasserstein, who was at that time represented off-Broadway by the Lincoln Center Theater production of Third, was very ill and had been hospitalized. Details of her condition were not released then.

Wasserstein is best known as the author of The Heidi Chronicles, which received the l989 Pulitzer Prize, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and Tony, New York Drama Critics Circle, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards. Her plays The Sisters Rosensweig and An American Daughter also played on Broadway. In addition to Third, her off-Broadway credits include Uncommon Women and Others, Isn't It Romantic, The Heidi Chronicles and Old Money. Third, which sold out its initially scheduled engagement before previews began, is now set to run at Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre through December 18. Wasserstein wrote the film The Object of My Affection and the books Bachelor Girls, Pamela's First Musical, Sloth and Elements of Style which will be published in May. The musical adaptation of Pamela's First Musical, which was set to premiere at California's Theatreworks in the spring, was recently indefinitely postponed because of Wasserstein's condition.

Wasserstein founded Open Doors, a mentoring program in theatre administered by the Theatre Development Fund for New York City public high school students. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she served on the Board of Directors of Open Doors as well as on the boards of the Educational Foundation of America, the School of American Ballet, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, WNET-TV/Channel 13 and on the Council of the Dramatists Guild.

Wasserstein is survived by her six-year-old daughter, Lucy Jane, her mother Lola Wasserstein, her brother Bruce Wasserstein, her sister Georgette Levis and eleven nieces and nephews.