With her previous Uncommon Women and Others, Wendy Wasserstein proved herself a playwright to watch and wait for; her current Isn't It Romantic throws the weight on the waiting rather than the watching, as the promise continues to be brighter than the delivery.

In Uncommon Women, Miss Wasserstein reminisced about herself and her college classmates, offering us enough uncommon and common women for a goodly cross section. Here … the cross section dwindles into a slice of life that, in turn, is mostly autobiography. That theme is apt to lead a young author down the garden path and straight into the flower beds of self-pity and sentimentality, which Miss W. avoids fairly successfully, but at the cost of landing in the shrubbery of prickly cuteness, a playful but all too defensive smart-aleckiness that tries to authenticate with ubiquitous thorns an absent rose….

Miss Wasserstein has gathered a nosegay of...