A Rosensweig by Any Other Name
Although San Jose Rep and TheatreWorks had both done the play in the past, the late Wendy Wasserstein’s 1992 Broadway hit had somehow never made it to San Francisco until now, so I’d never seen The Sisters Rosensweig before Saturday night—nor, if truth be told, had I seen any of Wasserstein’s plays. I had some vague notion that it had something to do with Chekhov’s Three Sisters, because of my unexamined assumption that anything with three sisters had to be informed by that play, from Lear’s daughters to Daisy Duck’s nieces. Turns out the Rosensweigs aren’t Chekhovian in the slightest, although Wasserstein tosses in a few Three Sisters references in the same offhand, apropos-of-nothing way that distinguishes a lot of play’s bon mots.
