I just know this woman hates me or is going to if she ever knows who I am

Also in the New York Times, a feature about Sarah Schulman, playwright, novelist, and lesbian.

Her fearlessness has won her a reputation for difficulty (which she dismisses as mere "rumor") and may have impeded her progress in the insular and touchy theater world. Certainly her plays - serious reflections on life at the margins, frequently experimental in structure or satirical in tone - have not achieved the acclaim of her fiction. Her novels are published by major houses and reviewed respectfully. (Of her book "Rat Bohemia," Edmund White wrote, "The force of her indignation is savage and has blown the traditional novel off its hinges.") Her plays, on the other hand, have until recently been produced at "rat-infested parking lots" or downtown dives with names like University of the Streets and Women's One World. They have received a few mainstream reviews, ranging from scornful ("a talking poster") to glowing ("every line will ring true"), but have mostly been ignored.

Because she finds that intolerable - "Respect is my Achilles' heel," she said - and because she is very smart, Ms. Schulman set out quite deliberately, around 1994, to beat the system. And now, at 47, after an "an 11-year-crawl," she finally seems poised for a substantial breakthrough. Her new play, "Manic Flight Reaction," which is in previews at Playwrights Horizons and opens on Oct. 30, wraps a typically serious Schulman theme (the need to take responsibility for the pain you cause others) in a delightful premise: a young woman discovers that her mother's ex-lover is now the wife of a Republican presidential candidate. Will she be outed? It's a surprise to find Ms. Schulman working this comic vein; the set could pass for the living room on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show." But even more so, given Ms. Schulman's reputation for ideological absolutism, it's a surprise to see her slyly question the assumptions of all the characters: not just obvious bad guys but also the delightful main character, Marge, a 50-ish lesbian academic described in the stage directions as "struggling to settle - at the last minute - into normalcy, but lovingly."