| The playwright Wendy Wasserstein had tried to get pregnant for nearly a decade by the time she settled into the Labor and Delivery ward at New York City’s Mount Sinai. She was forty-eight, and, although she was finally expecting, nearly everything would prove a surprise. For reasons beyond age, Wasserstein stood out from the other soon-to-be moms: she was a Pulitzer and Tony winner for her most popular play, “The Heidi Chronicles,” and she’d received a second Tony a few years later for good measure. Hospital staff began stopping by her room for decorating advice because one of her friends, a Broadway costume designer, had given the space a color-coördinated makeover. As Wasserstein recalled in The New Yorker, the period that followed would be harrowing, though she lightens the retelling with comic analogies and quips. A pregnancy that she’d mostly concealed, even from her own mother, brought with it severe complications, then a life-or-death battle for a baby weighing less than two pounds. As in one of Wasserstein’s scripts, even the minor characters resonate; the playwright and her readers pray fervently for the smallest one of all. After arriving in the neonatal intensive-care unit, the brand-new mother refuses to cry, then makes a wish one might not anticipate in an I.C.U: “We were there, I hoped, for the long haul.” | 
No comments:
Post a Comment