As ever, Wasserstein in "Third" can be very funny, particularly in her wry embrace and gentle mockery of women who are spending their lives wondering what women's lives are supposed to be. But she also falls back too often on cliches and tired humor, especially in her portrait of Professor Laurie Jameson, who spouts academic-feminist jargon and complaints about hot flashes in equal measure.
Professor Jameson is not the play's title character; that honor belongs to one of her students, whose numeraled moniker - Woodson Bull III - supplies his nickname, "Third." But it is her life, not his, that clearly interests Wasserstein most: not just her menopause and her offstage husband's mid-life crisis, but her aging father, her rebelling daughter, her cancer-stricken friend, and through it all her feminist convictions and her slowly dawning doubts about whether they've made her less fully human, not more.
So Third serves not as a protagonist but as a foil for all Laurie Jameson's concerns - an anti-Laurie of sorts. In the unnamed, elite New England college where she was a pioneering woman on the faculty and has been teaching literature for decades, he is a preppy, Middle American wrestler who dares to challenge her rote characterization of "King Lear" as sexist, classist, and other wise oppressive.
Wasserstein has fun with the "Lear" arguments, giving Laurie a wackily extreme position that paints Goneril and Regan as the play's heroines and "good girl" Cordelia as a pathetic supporter of the patriarchy, and letting Third speak up movingly for the play's humane exploration of misused power and paternal love. But if your Obvious Metaphor Alert chimes when you see a professor teaching "Lear" while trying to be a good daughter to her senile father, it will start clanging wildly late in Act 2, when the old man goes wandering off in a raging storm. Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks, indeed.
