Playwright won Pulitzer, Tony

NEW YORK -- Playwright Wendy Wasserstein, who chronicled the feminist struggles and successes of the baby-boomer generation in such wryly observant works as "The Heidi Chronicles" and "The Sisters Rosensweig," has died of lymphoma at the age of 55.

Wasserstein died Monday at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, said Andre Bishop, head of Lincoln Center Theater and Wasserstein's close friend and mentor. She had been ill for several months.

Broadway theaters will dim their lights tonight in honor of Wasserstein.

"Wendy had a voice like no other and a great sense of the absurd," said Swoosie Kurtz, who appeared in "Uncommon Women and Others," Wasserstein's first stage success. "She could take something that was sad or somber in life, wrap her words around it and somehow make it light and not so disturbing."

Wasserstein's writing was known for its sharp, often comedic look about what women had to do to succeed in a world dominated by men.

"She was an extraordinary human being whose work and whose life were extremely intertwined," said Bishop, who produced most of her works, first at Playwrights Horizons and later at Lincoln Center Theater. "She was not unlike the heroines of most of her plays: a strong-minded, independent, serious good person who happened to have a wicked sense of humor."

Wasserstein found her greatest popular success with "The Heidi Chronicles," which won the best-play Tony as well as the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1989. Its insecure title character (played by Joan Allen) takes a 20-year journey beginning in the late 1960s and changes her attitudes about herself, men and other women.

Equally popular was "The Sisters Rosensweig," which moved from Lincoln Center to Broadway in 1993, and concerned three siblings who find strength in themselves and in each other.

Her most recent work, "Third," which ended a New York run last December, dealt with a female college professor, played by Dianne Wiest, whose liberal, feminist convictions are put to the test by a student she sees as the epitome of the white male establishment.

Born Oct. 18, 1950, Wasserstein, the youngest of five children, grew up first in Brooklyn in what she has called "a nice, middle-class Jewish family," and later in Manhattan. Her father, Morris, was a textile executive. She attended Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and then went to Yale University.

In public, Wasserstein was genial, often quite funny, presenting herself as a rumpled observer of her generation.

"So many people, whether they knew her or not, felt somehow connected to her," Bishop said. "If you went out with her to a restaurant in New York or anywhere in the country -- because her plays were done all over the country -- it was like going out with a rock star."

At age 48, Wasserstein had a daughter, Lucy Jane, born in 1999, three months prematurely. Despite persistent speculation, she always declined to reveal the identity of the girl's father.

Wasserstein's works Plays "Uncommon Women and Others" "Isn't It Romantic" "The Heidi Chronicles" "The Sisters Rosensweig" "An American Daughter" "Old Money" "Third" Books of Essays "Bachelor Girls" "Shiksa Goddess" "Sloth" Other "Elements of Style," novel. "Pamela's First Musical," children's book "The Object of My Affection," screenplay