Problem with no name: ageing and age identity in Wendy Wasserstein’s plays

Abstract

This paper relies on a feminist perspective on ageing to analyse Wendy Wasserstein’s plays. The Pulitzer-Prize winner Wendy Wasserstein (1950–2006) is good at dramatising the experience of women, especially their experience of ageing anxiety and ageing crises in their middle age. Their quest for identity is problematised in the paper in order to show the fluidity of identity through the passage of time and to represent human life as a continuity. The paper first studies feminist writings about ageing. It asserts that ageing is socially and culturally constructed, instead of biological in nature, and it also argues that women suffer more from the conspiracy of ageism and sexism.