Young Jean Lee is the first Asian-American woman to have her play performed on Broadway.
This occurred in July when Straight White Men opened. Lorraine Hansberry was the first AfricanAmerican
woman author with a play on Broadway when A Raisin in the Sun opened in 1959. We
featured Lorraine Hansberry and another playwright, Clare Boothe Luce, in enewsletters during
2017, after the announcement that they would both be inducted into the National Women’s Hall of
Fame. In honor of Young Jean Lee, this month we feature playwrights Anita Loos and Wendy
Wasserstein. Let’s learn more about these remarkable women.
Author, playwright and screenwriter Anita Loos is probably best known for her novel, then
Broadway play, then movie Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. She started as a scriptwriter in the silent
film industry in the early 1910s. Her script for The New York Hat earned her $25; it was a short
film starring Mary Pickford and featuring Lionel Barrymore in his film debut. Called by film director
D.W. Griffith “the most brilliant woman in the world,” Loos’s intertitles grace his 1916 epic movie
Intolerance.
