Passage: Wendy Wasserstein, 55

The playwright, who celebrated women confronting feminism, careers, love and motherhood in such works as The Heidi Chronicles and The Sisters Rosensweig, died Monday after a short battle with lymphoma. "She was an extraordinary human being whose work and whose life were extremely intertwined," said longtime friend and mentor Andre Bishop. "She was not unlike the heroines of most of her plays — a strong-minded, independent, serious good person." Wasserstein's writing was known for its sharp, often wry observations about what women had to do to succeed in a world dominated by men. In The Heidi Chronicles, which won the best-play Tony as well as the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1989, its insecure heroine (played by Joan Allen) takes a 20-year journey beginning in the late 1960s and changes her attitudes about herself, men and other women. The Sisters Rosensweig, which moved from Lincoln Center to Broadway in 1993, concerned three siblings who find strength in themselves and in each other. Her most recent work, Third, which ended a New York run in December, dealt with a female college professor, played by Dianne Wiest, whose liberal, feminist convictions are put to the test by a student she sees as the epitome of the white male establishment.