A: Uncommon Women was my thesis. [It was not received] especially well. There was one, my play-wrighting teacher, now I think he makes [a killing] writing for the soap opera "Santa Barbara." He was a smart man, I liked him, and he liked it a lot.

Q: Did you feel like people at Yale were pushing you to do more avant-garde, more experimental work than you were interested in?

A: When I went there, it was hardly a place for women playwrights, or women directors, or women teachers. My [thesis] wasn't taken seriously because one, it wasn't avant-garde, and two, it didn't have "serious issues" in it, and in my mind, I thought, well, I think women's lives are serious. If you're writing about the foibles of upper middle class women, it's not important, and dealing with it in a humorous way exacerbates it.

Q: Do you think Heidi would need to be adapted to be successful in foreign countries?

A: Well I don't know, you find out where your plays have been successful, it's fascinating. I've never had a play done in England for whatever reason. My plays have done very well in Australia. Heidi's done well in Germany--I kept thinking Heidi did well in Germany because people thought it's Heidi the mountain girl--and they've done okay in Japan. Sisters Rosensweig might be done in England next year...I saw Isn't It Romantic? in Japan and the woman who played Janie Blumberg was the star in [an all-female] theater where the producer told me that all the women are virgins. I have no idea. I don't know how he knew either. The woman who was in my play--not only was it the first time she'd played an American or a Jew, it was the first time she'd ever played a woman. Also women in Japan over 25 are called "Christmas cakes," so she told me, "I am Janie Blumberg."

Q: Do you worry about anti-Semitic reactions to your plays abroad, or an unwillingness to identify with your Jewish characters?

A: I worry about people saying, "It's too Jewish," or "It won't work outside of New York," and I always think, "I think people have sisters outside of New York." I'm not sure but I've heard rumors. I think that's partially why I've always tried my plays out in Seattle, at least the last two--because I know I'm going to come up against that, so I might as well deal with that. People say "The Heidi Chronicles, oh, it's too New York a play." And I think, "Actually, it's about someone from the Midwest, and it's about someone who isn't Jewish."

Q: Did you make a point of creating a protagonist who wasn't Jewish for Heidi?

A: It was deliberate. Because I didn't want people to say, "That's Wendy, and she's cranky." As a writer I was interested in writing Scoop, the man, as the Jewish one.

Q: Do you feel like the men in that play were your best-developed male characters to date?

A: I find those men really interesting. I think Bill Clinton is a lot like Scoop Rosenbaum. I think they have a lot in common. What was interesting was writing the gay doctor because in a way I was scared, because a lot of my male friends are gay. And I was very scared of doing it, I wanted to do right by them.

Q: Robert Brustein has criticized commercial theater for letting the audience leave feeling "warm and wise," and he puts Sisters Rosensweig in that category. Are you uncomfortable with that criticism?

A: I think you write the kind of play you can write. I wouldn't want to write a play that calls attention to itself. It's not me, and I resist the temptation to do it, to say, "I know how to do these things, too." What's wonderful about Broadway right now is who's being commercial: A woman who's written a play about three women over 40 with a 54-year-old star and a guy who's written a "gay fantasia." It's terrific, it's just that there should be more. There should be ten or twenty, if more theaters could stay open and ticket prices were less. But this country, it's very interesting: I mean the thought that "Philadelphia" is the number-one movie or that Tony [Kushner] has had a remarkable success.

Q: What do you think of David Dinkins' predictions that this may become a city where people can't afford to live but whose strength will become bringing people in for cultural consumption?

A: Well, I interviewed Joe Papp years and years ago and he was worried about it, he said, "You know, when I started working here, a person could graduate college and afford to come to New York and take a junky job till they could work in the theater." He was concerned that people wouldn't come because it was too expensive, that they would go off to Seattle or someplace else that was more conducive to a life in the arts. And I thought, that's true, even when I got out of Yale, I moved to New York, and had a cheap apartment, and I was the delivery girl for the O'Neill Foundation and wrote my plays and had my plays done at Playwrights Horizons, and you could live that kind of a life. The kind of life one would have heard of in the '30s and the '50s, and it scares me now that you can't have that kind of life. I worry about New York in that way, that it won't attract the new generation, your generation.