Wendy Wasserstein's "Tender Offer" is about a father who is so late picking up his little daughter at dancing school that he misses her recital. At the beginning, the child … is waiting alone, filling in time by improvising a dance to "Carolina in the Morning." She is furious, but we don't realize how furious until the father appears with some lame excuse about being detained at the office. Their conversation is stiff to begin with (and very funny, too), but when a silver trophy drops out from under the child's rolled-up dancing clothes the father begins to realize that what he has done to her is serious, and—two steps forward, one step back—a permanent reconciliation begins. Miss Wasserstein has used a trivial incident to trigger important emotions, and she doesn't falter for a moment.
Edith Oliver, in a review of "Tender Offer," in The New Yorker, Vol. LIX, No. 17, June 13, 1983, p. 98.
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