An American Daughter

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Seems that every ten years a major political comedy drama hits the American stage. These few include Maxwell Anderson’s Both Your Houses, Lindsay and Crouse’s State of the Union, Louis Verneuil’s Affairs of State, Gore Vidal’s The Best Man, and more recently Beau Willison’s Farragut North and The Parisian Woman. Add to this list Wendy Wasserstein’s literate Broadway 1997 failure An American Daughter, the only play on this list by a woman playwright. Considering how short it ran on Broadway, there are a great many people who would like to see an unknown Wasserstein play, famed for her wit and women characters. Unfortunately, the La Femme Theatre Production which uses the New York first act and the Chicago second act has not made the case for this as a lost classic.

Political plays tend to date as they are usually based on recent topical scandals or events that have less relevance years later. True to form, Wasserstein reveals in her introduction to the published play that her inspiration for An American Daughter was the case of Zoe Baird, lawyer and executive, who was President Bill Clinton’s first choice for U.S. Attorney General in 1993. During her Senate confirmation hearing it was revealed that she had employed illegal aliens for child care and not paid their required social security payments, which came to be known as “Nannygate.” As a result, she had to remove her name from nomination, though she would have been the first woman to serve in this position. Ironically, the next two nominees (Judge Kimba Wood and Professor Lani Guinier) also had to remove their names for similar reasons. Wasserstein also reminds us that a few months before Hillary Rodham Clinton, then the wife of the presidential nominee, announced that she didn’t want to stay home and bake cookies which infuriated many American homemakers as elitist or snobbish.

Part of the problem with Wasserstein’s play is that she tries to shoehorn too much into her play. Her heroine Lyssa Dent Hughes, a liberal public health official who has been both the director of a major public hospital and now a professor of public health at Georgetown University, has been nominated by the president as his second candidate for Surgeon General. As she is liberal and pro-choice, and her father is a conservative Republican, she appears to be popular with all factions.  In the course of a tv interview in her home, it transpires that she had forgotten to answer a notice for jury duty and in describing her mother who died when she was 14 years old says that she tried to be like ordinary Indiana housewives and make icebox cakes. Although Lyssa’s father Alan Hughes is a 24-year senator from Indiana, and she is a fifth-generation descendant of General Ulysses S. Grant, these statements lead to a public outcry and the women of American call for her name to be taken out of nomination.

Not only are these scandals not enough for Wasserstein but each of the houseful of characters at Lyssa’s Georgetown mansion have their own story: Lyssa’s husband Walter Abrahmson, Matlock Professor of Sociology at Georgetown who has not been able to follow up his best-selling textbook Towards a Lesser Elite from five years ago, is having a middle-life crisis; Lyssa’s best friend Dr. Judith B. Kaufman, an African-American Jewish professor and doctor of oncology at Georgetown, is attempting to  conceive a child invitro before it is too late for her; Lyssa’s father, Sen. Hughes has just remarried for the fourth time to socialite Charlotte nicknamed “Chubby” because she has always been thin; and Lyssa and Walter’s friend Morrow McCarthy, a conservative gay pundit who used to have a column in the Washington Post, has just sold a screenplay to Disney Studios for one million dollars.

Add to this list tv interview Timber Tucker, a hero war correspondent, who is worried that his show Time Zone is being canceled and reporter Quincy Quince, once Walter’s most promising student who wrote the best seller The Prisoner of Gender, an ambitious neo-feminist looking for her next story and you have a set of unpleasant people all looking after their own interests. First, it is Walter who brings up the unanswered jury notice and then Morrow continues to harp on it making it an on-camera issue.

Though Wasserstein was known for her wit and one-liners, this play only has bitchy repartee and nothing quotable. Director Sarna Lapine does little to keep the play from being a talk fest or the two tv interviews, one in the first act and another in the second act, from being a repeat though with different costumes. Her casting and/or direction is deficient with the cast being extremely uneven. As the heroine, Jean Lichty (who is also the producer) is wooden and stilted with a flat delivery at odds with the snappy dialogue. Her scenes with jaunty and buoyant Robert Sean Leonard as her husband are not very intimate though he seems to be enjoying himself.

Montego Glover as Lyssa’s long-time best friend is delightful but she seems to be in a different play from the others. Dakin Matthews as Indiana Senator Hughes is very Southern though his ancestor Gen. Grant was from Ohio. As his new wife, Mary Beth Peil, long time veteran of the New York stage, seems to be an airhead when we first meet her but proves to be the most astute of all. As the handsome television interviewer Timber Tucker, Chris Ghaffari is very bland and devoid of charisma but that may be the fault of the writing which does not allow for much personality. Wasserstein does not seem to like journalist Carmen Zilles’ Quincy Quince as she has made her the sort of person to sacrifice her own mother to get a story, while Ryan Spahn’s Morrow McCarthy is the worst kind of gay conservative: self-centered, selfish and egocentric. Both actors are good at what they are doing but somewhat unbalance the play.

The design is also a mixed blessing. Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams’ huge living room is quite attractive but misses the homey coziness that would make it feel lived in. The huge picture window over the back garden becomes distracting when we are meant to focus on the events in the room. Not much is done to make the room seem like a different place during the television tapings, a problem which makes the play seem repetitious. Donna Zakowska’s costumes are attractive but also at times draw attention to themselves either as too gaudy or out of character. Alan C. Edwards’ lighting sets the time of day but is often a show in itself like the sunset in one of the later scenes. The sound design by Darron L. West is much in evidence due to the many radio and television news clips we hear in the course of the play.

In An American Daughter, Wendy Wasserstein approaches a topic still relevant: how American women in public life are expected to be perfect in all things while the men are given a pass for similar behavior. Notice that 29 years after this play appeared on Broadway, the United States has still not had a woman president. Unfortunately, the play is too schematic to be convincing and without enough humor to carry the story to its logical ending. While this production does not make a strong case for this as one of Wasserstein’s better plays, it is still possible that a future staging with a different cast might solve the current problems in this one.

An American Daughter (extended through September 20, 2026)

La Femme Theatre Productions

The Irene Diamond Stage at the Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 W. 42^nd Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, visit http://www.lafemmetheatreproductions.org

Running time: two hours and 35 minutes including one intermission