Wendy Wasserstein is apparently a young woman with a darting sense of the ridiculous, eyes which flicker mercilessly across a room and spy one absurd detail after another. She could easily have turned her play "Uncommon Women and Others" into an extended "Saturday Night Live" routine.

But she has put that Eastern school precocity in its place and created a group of characters who demand not only sympathy but affection. The laughs are there, many of them genuine thigh smackers, but Miss Wasserstein has shown triumphantly that she knows when to stop….

There's more than a trace of nostalgia for the rarefied atmosphere of the old snob schools. For young women in their late 20s, confronting vaguely unsatisfying marriages and careers, the smack of young minds working off of each other has to be remembered fondly.

But the real triumph of "Uncommon Women" is that you leave the...