


Rosalyn Drexler, an Obie Award-winning playwright, Emmy Award-winning comedy writer, acclaimed novelist, lauded Pop Art painter, found-objects sculptor, self-described funky nightclub singer, frequent book and film critic, onetime professional wrestler and lifelong feminist, died on Wednesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 98.
The death was confirmed by Lloyd Wise, a director of the Garth Greenan Gallery in Manhattan, which represented Ms. Drexler’s work.
“There is a feeling among Rosalyn Drexler’s friends,” Nora Ephron wrote in The New York Post in 1965, “that she is carrying this Renaissance Woman bit a little too far.” And she was just getting started.
An article in Newsweek about her 1963 exhibition at Kornblee Gallery in Manhattan praised her collage paintings for their reflection of “the tabloidization of the modern sensibility.” The article quoted Ms. Drexler about her painting “Time Trap,” which showed a man with a gun in the center of a clock. “Everybody is trapped in time,” she said. “It has no dimensions, and you can’t shoot your way out of it.”
In 1964, “Home Movies,” her evening of two one-act musicals, won an Obie for distinguished play, although Louis Calta, reviewing it for The New York Times, had found it “contrived and dotty.” She won the Obie again twice: in 1979, for “The Writer’s Opera,” about a woman’s dual role as artist and mother, and in 1985, for “Transients Welcome,” three one-acts. When Clive Barnes was chief theater critic of The Times, he pronounced Ms. Drexler “the queen of the underground drama.”