‘An American Daughter’ Not Quite of Age

In 1993, President Clinton tried and failed to appoint two women to the position of Attorney General. The first, Zoë Baird, withdrew after it was discovered that she and her husband had used undocumented immigrants for services including childcare, and not paid their social security taxes; the second, Kimba Wood, had hired a nanny with the same status while it was still legal to do so, and paid the required taxes, but by then “Nannygate,” as the Baird affair came to be known, had made Ms. Wood’s nomination untenable.The playwright Wendy Wasserstein, who a few years earlier had won a Tony Award and a Pulitzer Prize for “The Heidi Chronicles,” was paying close attention. “Chronicles” had followed a fictional art historian born around the same time as Wasserstein—that is, several years after Ms. Wood and shortly before Ms. Baird—from her student days into early middle age, tracing cultural and political developments that impacted women from the upheaval of the sixties through the Reagan era.Dr. Lyssa Dent Hughes, the protagonist of Wasserstein’s “An American Daughter,” which premiered on Broadway in 1997, is in her early 40s, roughly the same age as Ms. Baird during her ordeal, though Lyssa’s predicament more closely mirrors Ms. Wood’s. Her name is put forward — not for the government’s top legal official, but for the spot of Surgeon General — after another female nominee is called out for the same offenses that felled Ms. Baird.The controversy that develops around Lyssa, a former president of Georgetown Hospital and a fifth-generation descendant of Ulysses S. Grant, concerns what would seem an even more trivial transgression. At one point, our heroine failed to respond to a jury duty notification; while juggling her many professional and personal responsibilities, the doctor and mother of twins claims, she likely misplaced it.For La Femme Theatre Productions’ new presentation of “Daughter,” now running off-Broadway at the Pershing Square Signature Center, La Femme’s founder and executive director, Jean Lichty, worked with director Sarna Lapine and script supervisor Will DeVary — Mr. DeVary also appears in the staging, in which Ms. Lichty plays Lyssa — to craft a new, two-act version, drawing from eight incarnations of the play, which has historically received mixed reviews. Wasserstein, who died in 2006 of lymphoma, after a battle with cancer, implied that sexism was an issue, noting that a female critic had preferred it to her more numerous male colleagues.As a woman, I’d propose that just as there are movies written by women and then there are chick flicks, there are also chick plays, and “Daughter,” though smart and sharply crafted, can lean in this direction. In particular, Lyssa’s similarly accomplished but childless friend Dr. Judith Kaufman, with her sassy wisecracks and her laments about not being able to have it all, to say nothing of her fondness for Liz Claiborne, suggests a fantasy of a brilliant career woman created for Lifetime TV — which, as it happens, aired the screen adaptation of “Daughter,” in 2000 starring Christine Lahti.Other portraits similarly strive for complexity but border on banality. There’s Lyssa’s husband, Walter Abrahmson, naturally successful and erudite and supportive of his even higher-flying wife, though still vulnerable to those nasty male impulses that maybe, just maybe, are inflamed by a little repressed jealousy. Lyssa’s dad, Alan Hughes, is a four-times-married Republican senator who is also decent and devoted to his daughter — roughly the equivalent, in a play like this, of a hooker with a heart of gold.It’s a credit to Ms. Lapine and the actors here that the performances are nonetheless, with one notable exception, polished and compelling. Judith, who is also black and Jewish, is played by Montego Glover, an extremely likeable actress who focuses on mining her character’s warmth and humor.Robert Sean Leonard is perfectly cast as the whip-smart and sensitive but briefly wayward Walter, and the marvelous Dakin Matthews brings salt and substance to Alan. Ryan Spahn and Carmen Zilles convincingly play a pair of less sympathetic characters: respectively, the preening Morrow McCarthy, who is both gay and vehemently opposed to abortion, and the even more snarkily named Quincy Quince, Walter’s star protegée and a shallow, scheming opportunist.The leading lady, unfortunately, proves a stiffer, less natural presence. Ms. Lichty, while very attractive, also — there’s no delicate way to put this— appears older than Lyssa; her coarse, seemingly strained speaking voice makes this factor more pronounced and was, for me, a distraction throughout the show. (I would, obviously, make the same observations of a male actor if I felt they applied.)Ms. Lichty should be commended for trying to breathe new life into a play that, whatever its flaws, is beloved by many in the theater community. But without a credible, commanding performer in the title role, “An American Daughter” will likely have a tough time winning converts.

‘An American Daughter’ Not Quite of Age

‘An American Daughter’ Not Quite of Age

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