As long as a playwright is alive and working, there is no guarantee that they won’t go back in and tinker with a script. Even if a show has been produced, published and long since unleashed on the world, rewrites are an author’s prerogative, spurred by the nagging wish to fix what might be wrong.
Wendy Wasserstein wrote multiple drafts of her feminist play “An American Daughter,” which ran briefly on Broadway in 1997, and which, if her 1998 preface to the published text is any indication, she did not consider a success. It was a little clunky, true, but it also had her characteristic blend of comedy, wistfulness and anger.
When I read it recently, not having seen it since it was new, I was surprised at the shrewdness in its Clinton-era tale of a fictional woman’s rocky nomination to be surgeon general, and how brightly it seems to illuminate the cultural path we’ve walked from that time to this.
It is an apt moment, then, for an Off Broadway revival, and Sarna Lapine’s staging for La Femme Theater Productions has an audacious additional interest factor. Wasserstein died 20 years ago, at 55; her own adjustments to the script are long since completed. Yet this production — with her representatives’ blessing — uses a newly revised version of the play, incorporating text from her various drafts.
Who knows whether Wasserstein would approve, if she were around to check the script, but the edits seem thoughtful, not vandalistic.
Safeguarding a playwright’s legacy is a complex responsibility, though, and it is surprising that Wasserstein’s estate greenlighted a New York revival by La Femme, whose founder, Jean Lichty, often has starring roles in its shows. It is entirely possible to sink a production studded with established talent, as this one eye-catchingly is, if the actor at its center is not in that league.
That is what has happened here. It is not a total loss — Mary Beth Peil and Dakin Matthews, the production’s M.V.P.s, deliver sublimely assured performances — but generally the cast seems quite foiled.
Lichty plays Lyssa Dent Hughes, a well-connected Washington liberal devoted to women’s health issues. She is intended to be a noncontroversial surgeon general nominee, but her insecure husband, Walter (Robert Sean Leonard), undermines that by telling a ratings-hungry TV journalist, Timber Tucker (Chris Ghaffari), about a jury duty summons that she once ignored.
Then Lyssa, whose father is a U.S. senator from Indiana, says something to Timber about the “icebox cakes and cheese pimento canapés” that her late, stay-at-home mother used to make, and the nation’s women instantly convict her of condescension.
All of this unfolds at Lyssa and Walter’s apparently enormous home in Georgetown. On the Irene Diamond Stage at the Pershing Square Signature Center, their wealth-drenched but comfortable living room looks big enough for “Bridgerton” to host a ball in. (Set design is by Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams.)
Through this space pass the people in their lives: Judith (Montego Glover), an oncologist who is Lyssa’s best friend, and who is struggling, as Wasserstein did, to get pregnant in her 40s; Morrow (Ryan Spahn), Walter’s anti-abortion, gay, right-winger pal, who contributes to Lyssa’s derailment; her Republican father, Alan (Matthews), and his brand-new fourth wife, Chubby (Peil); and Quincy Quince (Carmen Zilles), Walter’s former student, a spotlight-seeking Gen X feminist whose new book is “The Prisoner of Gender.”
It is all very ’90s. In the enduring double standard women face, it is also very now. The parallels to Hillary Clinton’s stand-by-my-man debacle are evident, not least when Lyssa puts on a headband to do an apology interview. Wasserstein’s own life echoes in Judith’s clinical focus on breast cancer, which Wasserstein’s sister Sandra had at the time. (A present-day twinge: All three Wasserstein sisters died of cancer.)
But this version of the play unwisely removes the offstage dialogue of Lyssa’s sons, subtracting the constant demands of motherhood from her having-it-all equation. It also takes away the boys’ glued-to-the-computer perspective on the online political culture that was just bubbling up then.
“An American Daughter” is not a masterwork. Still, it would be valuable to get an unobstructed view of this keenly observed drama, and a clear channeling of its comic and emotional rhythms.
Given Lichty’s blank and wooden performance, though, we simply can’t believe in Lyssa or in her relationships. With the exception of the production’s two most veteran actors — Peil and Matthews, who sail through with their characters’ humor and humanity intact — Lichty’s nothingness deadens her scenes with her cast mates.
As Quincy says of Lyssa, “It’s not good for any of us to watch an established icon being hung out to dry.”
Established icon is, in fact, the status Wasserstein reached in the theater before her much too early death. And it isn’t the script here that betrays her.
An American Daughter
Through Sept. 20 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; lafemmetheatreproductions.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.
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