WENDY WASSERSTEIN BOUNDS out the doors of the Charles Hotel into the courtyard and plunks herself down at a round shaded table. Within minutes, she whips out a snapshot of her blond 18-month-old daughter, Lucy Jane, clownish and playful in her mom’s oversize shoes and clunky glasses. Wasserstein looks on proudly. “Isn’t she cute?” she says in a languid drawl. “She’s just so ... graceful.”

Dressed casually in a light-blue jacket, with a head of tamed shoulder-length curls framing her face, Wasserstein has just reluctantly wrested herself away from a phone conversation with her daughter’s pediatrician about antibiotics. “You think I know about this?” she says, shrugging. “My baby took something for her cough or asthma — Albuterol — and I kept calling it ‘Al Blumenthal.’ I mean ... ,” she interrupts herself, shaking her head from side to side and smiling widely enough to expose all her teeth. “It’s like suddenly you’re a specialist on babies and childhood education. And I’m not.”

Wasserstein may not be an expert on babies, but the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright most famous for The Heidi Chronicles and The Sisters Rosensweig got a crash course with the birth of her own child. The woman accustomed to getting all her meals delivered to her live-in hotel room had to bone up on baby food, formula, and breastfeeding. And today, she’s responsible for turning down not only her own bed, but also a crib. It’s a whole new set of rules, but Wasserstein has enthusiastically studied up for this newest phase in her life.

Wasserstein can’t believe she’s actually 50 — “Wendys don’t turn 50. They turn 80. They become wuuunderful eccentrics” — and she surely doesn’t act the part. Over the course of the conversation, her eyes crinkle in laughter behind her Gucci sunglasses, she unconsciously pats back her hair and drops the names J.Lo and Bridget Jones in the same five minutes, and she erupts into girlish giggles over things like the national obsession with leather pants. She marvels at the notion that she (she!) would be featured in the current issue of Bomb, the hip literary rag. But with a sparkling new collection of essays, Shiksa Goddess (Or, How I Spent My Forties) (Knopf, May 2001), a baby on the brink of toddlerhood, and newly slimmed-down curves, the energetic writer seems to have parted the curtain for her own second act.

WASSERSTEIN, WHO was brought up in a business-focused family in Brooklyn and then the Upper East Side, came to the theater world somewhat accidentally. After graduating from Mount Holyoke College in 1971, she moved to New York, where she got a job taking inventory for the Board of Education — measuring desks and such. On the side, she enrolled in a writing class at City College. When it came time for a change, Wasserstein hedged her bets, applying to such varied programs as the Yale Drama School and Columbia Business School. “I decided wherever I got in I was just going to go,” she says. “So I got into both and I decided to go to Yale.”

She earned an MFA in 1976, and 12 years later, in 1988, published one of her first major plays, The Heidi Chronicles, which traces the fictional life of Heidi Holland through three decades of the fight for women’s rights. For that play, Wasserstein won the Pulitzer Prize, a Tony Award, and many other accolades. She followed it up with the acclaimed plays The Sisters Rosensweig and An American Daughter; a children’s book; a collection of essays called Bachelor Girls; and the screenplay for the 1998 Jennifer Aniston film The Object of My Affection. In the mix, as a way to “keep in touch” with herself, she’s contributed essays to the New Yorker, the New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Elle Décor, Travel and Leisure, and Slate.

When The Heidi Chronicles originally appeared, critics bombarded Wasserstein with questions as to whether she herself might be the model for Heidi — who chose the controversial path of single motherhood at age 38. At the time, Wasserstein staunchly protested. Still, it seems today that Wasserstein couldn’t have scripted her own life better. When her older sister Sandra embarked on what turned out to be a losing battle with breast cancer — a story that Wasserstein recounts for the first time in Shiksa Goddess — the then-40-year-old author decided that, married or not, it was time for motherhood.

It didn’t come easy. After a seemingly endless course of fertility treatments, she finally harvested eggs and got successfully impregnated, only to develop preeclampsia, a high-blood-pressure condition that can lead to liver and kidney failure. She was forced into a hospital bed three months before her due date. Just over two weeks later, she gave birth to a very premature baby who had to stay in the prenatal intensive-care unit for two months before coming home, healthy, just in time for Thanksgiving. Today, Wasserstein proudly volunteers that her daughter, whom she theatrically calls “Miss Leuwcy,” is starting at the Barnard Toddler Center next year. “She’s starting an Ivy League college at age two,” Wasserstein says, fluttering her eyelashes and pursing her lips in jest. “So all of those friends of mine who say their daughters are starting Barnard, mine is ahhlso. I feel that since I went to Mount Holyoke, we’re two generations of Seven Sisters schools.” Half proudly and half self-mockingly, Wasserstein puffs and pats her chest. “We believe in the female education, my daughter and I.”