Wendy Wasserman’s ‘Sisters Rosensweig’ opens Friday at BPA.
It’s one birthday party where the guests receive the gift.
The party is the central plot point of “The Sisters Rosensweig,” a work that sees playwright Wendy Wasserman’s fictional sisters convene onstage to celebrate the 54th birthday of Sara, the eldest.
The present to the audience is the sparkling Bainbridge Performing Arts production (see Calendar, page A9) of the late playwright’s ensemble work featuring three Jewish American women.
An abiding interest in the lives of women marks Wasserman’s plays, works that garnered her a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony, as well as an Outer Critics Circle Award.
While her renowned 1988 plays, “Heidi Chronicles,” featured the struggles of young women, “The Sisters Rosensweig” speaks to ongoing concern with questions of identity and love in middle age.
“What I think audiences are going to love about this is how she portrays ‘women of a certain age,’” director Ellen Graham said. “You don’t often get to see those stories told, and this is very urban, very witty.”
Wasserman’s characters are familiar in their struggles to balance family, work and relationships. Realistically rendered and appealingly played by Sara Anne Scribner, Karen Harp-Reed and Marybeth Hinderer, the sisters could be the friends one meets for coffee at T&C or walks with at Battle Point Park.
Sara, Pfeni and Gorgeous are three Brooklyn-bred sisters, women of accomplishment still trying to find a balance between prescribed roles and individuality. All three have had bad relationships and two have little connection with their heritage.
In fact, each lives a sort of personal Diaspora.
Sara is a Radcliffe-educated Londoner living in a posh Queen Anne’s Gate apartment, “assimilated beyond her wildest dreams” and self-exiled from all things Jewish.
Pfeni, the youngest sister, is a journalist whose lifework has devolved to penning travel copy, a rootless wanderer living “as if she were on a permanent junior year abroad.”
Even middle sister, Gorgeous, whose life most closely follows the prescribed pattern of the suburban idyll – lawyer husband, big house, family life anchored in Temple Beth El – knows that her husband’s chronic underemployment makes her hold on that turf tenuous at best.
Questions of identity play out in relationships, as well. Pfeni’s boyfriend, the winsome Geoffrey, pines for men.
Sara, semi-survivor of several bad marriages, one small step from giving up on love entirely, barely manages a half-hearted romance with Nicholas Pym, a posh Brit who prefers young women.
But Wasserman is far from dour; she gives Sara a real birthday present in Mervyn (Brian Danzig), who more or less crashes the party to breach the wall of Sara’s defenses.
The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 serves as both historical context and mirror of the personal realities of the characters. As the map of Middle Europe is redrawn, each sister’s identity undergoes a seismic shift.
For Scribner, Sara’s frosty intellect can be understood, in part, as a response to her personal history.
“I think she’s a lot like me,” Scribner said. “She’s intelligent. She knows how to pronounce the names of cities. But she has let her emotions wither and die. The wonderful part of playing this role is that the character changes.
“She decides to take a risk and instead of being intelligent and witty as a defense, to speak from her heart.”
