Playwright Wendy Wasserstein exudes a fuzzy warmness that belies an ambitious and successful career in the theater. Her play Uncommon Women and Others, starring Jill Eikenberry, Swoosie Kurtz, and Glenn Close, was produced off-Broadway when she was 27. She received half a dozen awards for The Heidi Chronicles five years ago, including the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award (the first ever given to a woman dramatist without a male collaborator). Her latest, The Sisters Rosensweig, which received an Outer Critics Circle Award and Tony nomination on Broadway, opens in Boston today. In a conversation with The Harvard Crimson yesterday, she waxed ebullient about her life and work.

Q Uncommon Women and Others is focused around a college reunion at Mt. Holyoke. Have you gone to your Mt. Holyoke reunion, what was it like?

a Well, I gave a commencement speech at Mt. Holyoke three years ago. It was amazing, it was one of those moments where you see your life flashing in front of you. I was never a very good student so my giving a commencement speech seemed very odd to me. So I geared my entire speech to all the "C" students because I figured those who do well have enough people talking to them, but I wanted to talk to those who were not singled out.

I find my women friends from Mt. Holyoke to be very interesting people, I don't know if it has to do with who went to women's colleges at that time. Recently, I had dinner at the White House and I met Hillary Clinton and I thought, "There's a woman who went to Wellesley in the late 1960s, I get it." There's an earnestness, a sense of sympatico, a generation who sort of defines how you see things.

Q: What did you talk to Hillary Clinton about?

A: Well, about Jane Alexander, who was in Sisters, who now has that [National Endowment for the Arts] job. And [Hillary Clinton] asked me about writing plays, what it was like. I did actually [have fun at the White House], I have no idea why I was invited.

Q: In The Heidi Chronicles, the characters uniformly decry the Reagan years, the intellectual malaise in Washington. Will Clinton and Gore affect your future characters' pessimism about government?

A: Well, when Clinton was elected, you really wished them well. You wanted it to really work for them. It's much harder to want something to work than to be cynical, it's much easier to have an opinion if it's negative.

Q: You mean it's easier to editorialize in theater if you're against something?

A: In general it is, you always sound much smarter, and if you're a humorist, you can always find something. It's harder, in some ways it makes me feel grown up because it's not like, "Oh there are those grownups in the White House and when we get there it'll be better." Now it's us. It's scary in a way. You can see where we [our generation] is just like everybody else.

Q: I've read that there was the possibility of going to business school in your past?

A: Yes, I got into Columbia Business School, I think some madman accepted me. When I got out of college, I went to New York, and I took writing classes, with Israel Horovitz and Joe Heller, and my family had me under a lot of pressure to go to business school, so I applied to Columbia Business School and I applied to Yale Drama School. I think I had like 400's on the business boards, and I had Joe Heller recommend me. So it was really weird.

Q: Was it a question of a secure future, self-sufficiency, especially as a woman?

A: It was never for the sake of career. It's almost going back to a '60s mindset, to do something you really care about, something you really want to do. It's almost like a non-alienation-of-labor way, very sort of flower child, but I truly think that way. It was also heavily feminist, so that you wouldn't wake up at 40 with two kids in Scarsdale and not be able to go back to work.

Q: You wrote Uncommon Women at Yale. Was it received well?