An American Daughter

Cort Theatre

In the spring of 1997, as part of our "New Plays at the Cort" series, Lincoln Center Theater presented AN AMERICAN DAUGHTER by the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein. This was Wendy's first play since the much-loved The Sisters Rosensweig (produced in 1992 by LCT). In the tradition of her earlier works such as The Heidi Chronicles, Isn't It Romantic and Uncommon Women And Others, Wendy's new comedy-drama offered a funny, touching and sharply-observed portrait of a contemporary American woman and the people in her life. Set in contemporary Washington D.C., AN AMERICAN DAUGHTER focuses on Dr. Lyssa Dent Hughes, an expert on health care and the fortysomething daughter of a longtime Senator. When the President nominates her to a Cabinet post, a minor indiscretion from her past is discovered and the media whips it into a scandal which imperils her confirmation and divides her family and friends. Lyssa is then forced to make a decision in a no-win situation: continue to pursue the post and face an ugly Senate hearing or decline the nomination and become a sacrificial lamb for the President. Partisan politics in our nation's capital, however, are nothing compared to the heated personal politics in Lyssa's Georgetown living room, where her complicated relationships unravel with her father, husband and best girlfriend - not to mention her encounters with a neo-feminist author named Quincy Quince and a TV journalist named Timber Tucker. AN AMERICAN DAUGHTER marked Wendy's third collaboration with the gifted director Danniel Sullivan, who previously staged Rosensweig and Heidi (as well as Jon Robin Baitz's A Fair Country and The Substance of Fire).