A few weeks ago I was mildly deploring American dramatists' apparent inability to pull open the shutters and look out into the big world beyond the emotional hothouse within whose clammy confines they and their work would seem to have become terminally trapped….

[The] arrival of Wendy Wasserstein's "Isn't It Romantic" at Playwrights Horizons convinces me that last month's diagnosis was too vague and general. True, the American theater seems more preoccupied than ever with personal relationships: but not all that many could honestly be dignified as fully adult ones. For quite a few playwrights, some of them very talented, the great contemporary problem appears to be whether, when, how and why to grow up at all.

Call this diaper drama, though the infants it involves are more likely to be 20 or 30 than two or three. The first essential ingredient is at least one parent capable of obsessing...