[Wendy Wasserstein] is among the funniest and most inventive writers around, but the first version of "Isn't It Romantic" seemed to me "as out of shape and listless as its beguiling heroine." That has now changed. Miss Wasserstein has revised her script, and she and her director, Gerald Gutierrez, have given the play momentum and a sense of purpose; there is nothing listless here…. My first feeling was one of dismay that the play had lost its innocence, but eventually I realized that that was the whole point: it has indeed lost its innocence but in the doing has acquired muscle and form. Janie, for all her frustration and bewilderment, learns who she is and what she wants, and when she turns down the unsuitable doctor she knows exactly why. The statement "Life is negotiable" occurs several times in the text, but she is not about to negotiate. The troubling emotions that were an undercurrent the first time around have now been brought to the surface, and without any loss of humor. The action is still a matter of short episodes…. The conversations of Miss Wasserstein's Gentiles sound as authentic and bright as those of her Jews. Harriet's mother, in sharp contrast to Janie's parents, is the very model of detachment, and, when her daughter keeps pressing her for advice and counsel, replies, with some irritation, "What is this, 'Youth Wants to Know'?" That is just one, though, of many funny and telling episodes.
Edith Oliver, in a review of "Isn't It Romantic," in The New Yorker, Vol. LIX, No. 45, December 26, 1983, p. 68.
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