About the Play:

The Sisters Rosensweig has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues.

The Sisters Rosensweig is a full-length comedy by Wendy Wasserstein. Three Jewish-American sisters come together in London for the eldest's birthday and take stock of their busy lives and relationships with each other and with men. There's Sara, the successful banker, whose 54th birthday brings everyone together at her London flat. Pfeni is the globe-trotting journalist. And Gorgeous is an irrepressible radio host. This smart, funny and enthralling play looks at the quest for love, acceptance and self-fulfillment.

The Sisters Rosensweig is a captivating portrait of three disparate sisters reuniting after a lengthy separation and coming to terms with their differences, respect and love for one another. Sara Goode, an enormously successful American woman working as the British representative of a major Hong Kong bank, is about to celebrate her fifty-fourth birthday, and she isn't exactly too happy about it. Firmly ensconced in her lovely London home, she leads a quiet, almost cold, expatriate life with her daughter, Tess. For the birthday celebration, her two sisters, Gorgeous Teitelbaum (Dr. Gorgeous, loving housewife and mother, of Newton, MA, who has her own call-in radio advice program and hopes to make the leap to TV), and Pfeni Rosensweig (peripatetic third-world travel writer, alas, unmarried), are expected to arrive at any moment. As if this weren't causing Sara enough stress, Mervyn Kant shows up at her door, and she doesn't even know the man, who, at first sight, is instantly smitten with her. Mervyn is a furrier, and a friend of Geoffrey's, the on-again, off-again, bi-sexual lover of Pfeni. After her sisters arrive for the celebration, Tess, and her boyfriend, Tom, turn up and advise her that they're planning on rushing off to his ancestral Lithuania for reasons of political protest. Next to arrive is Nicholas, the stuffy Brit whom Sara has been "seeing" although he seems somewhat anti-Semitic. All of this adds up to a rather interesting evening, which leads to unexpected romance, suspected partings, recriminations, reconciliations and, above all, newfound love and acceptance.

The Sisters Rosensweig was first staged in 1992 at the Seattle Repertory Theatre. It premiered off-Broadway in 1993 at the Mitzi Newhouse Theater in the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts complex, transferred to Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York City, winning the 1993 Outer Critics Circle award for Best Broadway Play. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and has become a popular choice for college and community theatre productions.

Cast: 4 female, 4 male

What people say:

"The laughter is all but continuous." — The New Yorker

"Funny. Observant. A play with wit as well as acumen…In dealing with social and cultural paradoxes, Ms. Wasserstein is, as always, the most astute of commentators." — New York Times

"This is a simply lovely, funny play, and such family values benefit from small revelations." — New York Post

About the Playwright:

Wendy Wasserstein (1950-2006) was an American playwright, novelist, and an Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. She received the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1989 for her play, The Heidi Chronicles, often touted as a precursor to the HBO television series, Sex and the City. Over the course of her career, spanning four decades, she wrote eleven plays. She was admired both for the warmth and the satirical cool of her writing; each of her plays and books captures an essence of the time, makes us laugh, and leaves us wiser.