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American Drama, Family/Domestic Drama, Political & Social Issues - Drama
An American Daughter by Wendy Wasserstein β€” book cover

An American Daughter

by Wendy Wasserstein
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Overview

Lyssa Dent Hughes is a privileged, well-educated daughter of a Republican senator and fifth-generation granddaughter of Ulysses S. Grant, wife of a professor, owner of a pleasant Georgetown home. She is also the president's nominee for surgeon general. Then members of the media discover that once, in the past, she failed to respond to a call for jury duty. A relatively minor misstep - were it not for a good friend who uses the incident to make a point, scarcely thinking of the consequences. From that moment on, Lyssa Dent Hughes sits helplessly by while the press investigates her family and friends, shattering her privacy, her career, and her world.

Synopsis

Lyssa Dent Hughes is the privileged, well-educated daughter of a Republican senator. She is the wife of a professor and the owner of a lovely house in Georgetown. She is also the president's nominee for Surgeon General. When the media discovers that once, long ago, she failed to respond for jury duty, this relatively minor misstep is portrayed as a serious moral lapse. A good friend uses the incident to make a point, scarcely thinking of the implications, and Lyssa must suffer the consequences. From that moment on, Lyssa Dent Hughes sits helplessly as the press investigates her family and friends, shattering her privacy, her career, and her world. Wendy Wasserstein's trenchant humor and sizzling dialogue combine with biting political commentary to produce a masterful, and topical, drama.

Newsday

Enormously moving, with richly written characters.

About the Author, Wendy Wasserstein

Wendy Wasserstein is the author of many plays, including The Heidi Chronicles, for which she received a Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize. She has also been the recipient of the New York Drama Critics Circle Prize, the Drama Desk Award, and the Outer Critics Circle Award. She lives in New York City.

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Editorials

Newark Star-Ledger

A great big feast of Satirical social comment. In the delicious second act, everything climaxes in one of those terrific scenes that makes an audience hold its collective breath for minutes on end. An American Daughter makes for thoughtful and lively theatergoing.

Newsday

Enormously moving, with richly written characters.

NY Newsday

[we] can rejoice...in watching [Wasserstein] become her own bright, eloquent and great-hearted version of George Bernard Shaw. Wasserstein is at least as funny and observant as ever in this smart-talking living-room family play about the nomination of a female U.S. surgeon general. But the playwright is also electrifyingly reconnected to the bizarre, infuriating and defining contemporary forces beyond personal psychology. She has not merely returned to the broader political concerns of her cherished 1988 Pulitzer Prize-winning , she has returned with a vengeance, and with her craft honed tough for the task...Wasserstein is beautiful when she's angry...we must not forget to remind you that the play is also enormously moving, with richly written characters...

NY Post

Political comedies are unusual if only because dramatists rarely seem to take politics seriously enough to make fun of it. Wendy Wasserstein is obviously an exception, for in AN AMERICAN DAUGHTER she is making a distinct and often amusing attempt to expose that soft underbelly of American political life, its media awareness and its consequent confusion of public opinion polls with democracy.

NY Times

Wendy Wasserstein, the author of and [is] one of the few American playwrights since S.N. Behrman to create commercial comedies of manners with moral and social heft.

USA Today

[A] brave and ambitious play [that] portrays with withering accuracy the damage wrought by the tart-tongued TV culture of Washington.

Variety

With AN AMERICAN DAUGHTER, Wendy Wasserstein gets angry. Or rather, the anger that's always slept beneath her humor wakes up and announces itself...with the playwright's commitment and compassion (and another "c" β€”craft) that, put together, make for her most ambitious work to date.

Book Details

Published
June 1, 1999
Publisher
Dramatists Play Service, Incorporated
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780822216339

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