Wendy Wasserstein

In the intimate world of the theater, the passing of great artists is experienced as a personal loss. This week saw the death of two great American women playwrights, Wendy Wasserstein and Dr. Endesha Ida Mae Holland. Each touched many lives through their work as well as through numerous friendships and acts of personal kindness.

Dr. Endesha Ida Mae Holland

Wasserstein died on January 30 at the age of 55 from lymphoma. She had entertained and illuminated us with the ambitions and frustrations faced by contemporary American women in a series of important plays that included The Heidi Chronicles (for which she won the Pulitzer Prize), The Sisters Rosensweig, and Isn’t it Romantic.

My first recollection of Wasserstein was in 1979 when her play, Uncommon Women and Others, was filmed for television on the campus of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where I was a student. Our campus stood in for all-female Mount Holyoke, and so, my female classmates from the theater department served as extras alongside Meryl Streep and Swoosie Kurtz, while the boys jealously looked on from the sidelines. Many years later, I recalled the event when interviewing the playwright in Seattle, where several of her Broadway-bound works debuted. She enjoyed hearing tales of the filming from the point of view of a former student, and was intrigued to hear about a production of The Sisters Rosensweig that I had seen in Spain as Las Hermanas Rosensweig. A loving and upbeat person with a good word to say about everyone, Wasserstein was one the most beloved and accessible personalities on the Broadway scene. Her death, after her fairly recent diagnosis for lymphoma, comes as a shock to the theater world, especially in the wake of her recent hit play, Third, at Lincoln Center, and because the playwright herself was such a life-affirming spirit.

On Wednesday, January 25, Dr. Endesha Ida Mae Holland died at a nursing facility in Los Angeles at the age of 61, after a long struggle with ataxia nervosa, an inherited condition resulting in degeneration of motor coordination. She was the author of several plays, including From the Mississippi Delta, a retelling of her own life and rise from poverty, racism, and abuse in Greenwood, Mississippi, through the Civil Rights Movement, and on to the achievement of a Ph.D. The play was first performed at Buffalo’s Ujima Theatre Company, before touring the United States. It would eventually be performed at London’s Young Vic, at Circle in the Square off-Broadway, and at every major regional theater. Holland expanded on the story in an autobiography of the same title.

Holland had taken early retirement from the University of Southern California in 2003 where she had been on the faculty for ten years, as a result of her disease. Before that, she had been a associate professor of Women’s Studies at the University at Buffalo.

Knowing Endesha was an education in the life of a playwright. We met when I went to her Richmond Avenue home to interview her for Theater Week magazine. I found her immobilized by a broken leg, the result of a fall brought about by the onset of ataxia. Before our conversation had concluded, Endesha, ever a charmer, had recruited me to go to the offices of National Fuel with her portfolio in order to negotiate for the company not to shut off her gas. Within the month, my partner Javier and I were representing her as her agents, negotiating contracts for productions of her play in London, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Hartford, and Detroit, promoting her in the press, and doing battle with the Negro Ensemble Company, which had sent a tour of her play out across the country but was not paying her the required royalties. I learned, firsthand, that the entertainment industry is infested with snakes and that a good bankruptcy attorney can be your best friend. Endesha felt permanently indebted (in a nice way) to attorney Carl Buckeye, a prince among men, who rescued the copyright of her plays from the bankruptcy court and from the wiles of various vipers in the entertainment world.

If I were asked, as Patrick Dennis once was, who is the most extraordinary person I have ever known in my life, I would likely answer, Dr. Endesha Ida Mae Holland. (She always insisted that the “Dr.” be used in her name, because, “If I am going to tell people that I used to be a whore, I want them to know that I finished as a Ph.D.!”) My time working with Endesha was a wild ride, including a documentary with Jane Pauley and a listing among Time magazine’s “Best Plays of 1991.” Hers was an inspiring voice, and she touched as many people as a teacher as she did as an artist. We will never see her like again.

Holland is survived by her sister, Jean Beasley; her son, Cedric; her brother, Charlie Nellums; and granddaughter, Kashka.