Play: Isn't It Romantic

Overview
"Isn't It Romantic" is a sharp, witty early play by Wendy Wasserstein that follows two friends, Janie and Harriet, as they negotiate the tangled demands of love, career and selfhood in their late twenties. The play captures the small triumphs and dissolving illusions of young urban women striving for independence at a moment when societal expectations still tug strongly toward marriage and domestic life. Wasserstein's voice is conversational and observant, blending humor with a persistent undercurrent of poignancy.

Plot and Structure
The action unfolds as a series of scenes and encounters that chart Janie and Harriet's parallel, and sometimes overlapping, searches for satisfaction. Rather than hinge on a single melodramatic incident, the play accumulates moments: first dates, awkward conversations with family, job negotiations and after-hours confessions. These episodic beats reveal shifting priorities and compromises, and the emotional truth emerges through what the women say to one another and what they withhold. The result is a portrait of everyday decision-making that feels both immediate and quietly resonant.

Characters
Janie and Harriet are drawn with intimacy and specificity; their friendship is the centerpiece, supplying both comic banter and moral ballast. Janie tends toward yearning for security and connection, while Harriet often articulates a more ironic, career-minded stance, yet both women wobble between conviction and doubt. Supporting figures glimpse the social world that presses in on them, romantic prospects, well-meaning relatives, and professional acquaintances, each revealing different pressures and possibilities. Characters are sketched economically but fully enough to feel alive and recognizable.

Themes
At its heart the play is about choices: what to pursue, what to give up, and how to define success when cultural scripts feel inadequate. Wasserstein probes the uneasy intersections of feminism and longing, showing how ambition and desire do not simply cancel one another out but complicate daily life. Identity, friendship and the need for emotional honesty recur as central concerns, and the play quietly questions easy dichotomies between independence and intimacy. There is also a persistent attention to class, education and cultural background, which shape the characters' horizons and anxieties.

Style and Reception
Wasserstein's dialogue is brisk, witty and laced with a self-aware intelligence that became a signature throughout her career. The tone shifts easily from sharp comedy to tender reflection, and the playwright's ear for contemporary speech gives the piece its verisimilitude. Critics and audiences welcomed the play for its immediacy and heartfelt empathy, seeing it as a promising debut that announced a distinctive new voice in American theater. Its semi-autobiographical quality and compassionate scrutiny of women's interior lives would inform Wasserstein's later, more celebrated works while standing on its own as a humane, funny and candid snapshot of a particular moment in young women's lives.