Enter, Stage Left
Movie scripter Nora Ephron turns playwright to make rival writers 'Imaginary Friends'
By Janice Steinberg
for the San Diego Union-Tribune
September 26, 2002

Nora Ephron is noted for her wicked wit, even in such sigh-at-the-end romantic comedies as "Sleepless in Seattle" and "When Harry Met Sally." So who better than Ephron to take on two of the most wickedly witty writers of the 20th century, Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy? And to call her play about these bitter rivals "Imaginary Friends?"

Premiering at the Globe Sunday -- and heading straight to Broadway later this fall -- "Imaginary Friends" is Ephron's first stage play, and the screenwriter-director initially considered working in a more familiar medium to dramatize this epic literary feud. She couldn't see a film in the story, however, and Plan B, a television miniseries, depressed her.

"I got sad thinking about the miniseries of it, because it just seemed as if it was going to be one of those dreary bio-pics," she said, sipping iced tea in Balboa Park's Alcazar Garden. The 61-year-old writer is petite, with soft brown hair -- a deceptively demure appearance for a woman with a reputation for toughness.

"Then somebody said to me, 'Can it be a play?,' and it was an instant cartoon light bulb going on," she said. "I suddenly thought, of course it's a play. They're both dead, finally they're together, and I won't be bound by the conventions of biography or journalism or even the conventions of docudrama as I see them."

Ephron ended up pushing theatrical conventions, as well -- as if, once she got a taste of the freedom that theater offered, she bit into it with the gusto of Meg Ryan in that famous deli scene in "When Harry Met Sally."

She played with repetition, for example, several times revisiting a key incident from each woman's childhood (related to their very different attitudes toward lying). And, rather than having children portray the two as girls, they are played over a seven-decade span by the same actresses, Tony Award winners Swoosie Kurtz (Hellman) and Cherry Jones (McCarthy).

"You get such a sense of how fantastic the theater is for the instruments they possess," Ephron said. "They are so underused when they appear on television in the same role every single week and in movies, where the range is very narrow deliberately, because the camera doesn't like a lot of acting. So it's thrilling to be able to create this and watch them sink their teeth into it."

Another twist on convention: All of the male roles are played by one actor, Harry Groener. "It reduces the men properly," said director Jack O'Brien. (Just returned from opening "Hairspray" on Broadway, O'Brien sported a violently yellow "Hairspray" baseball cap.) "Too often in a situation like this, the men plant their stolid feet in the middle of the stage and bark."

And, although the story of two intellectuals who cared passionately about leftist politics hardly strikes one as inherently musical, Ephron knew from the beginning that she wanted to include songs.

"Music has this generous thing it does for plays, as opposed to pushing people away from them," she said. "So I stuck about eight ideas for songs into the first draft."

To compose the music, she invited her pal Marvin Hamlisch to join the star-studded production team.

Not that "Imaginary Friends" is a musical -- the music doesn't drive the story as in Hamlisch's Pulitzer Prize-winning "A Chorus Line." Neither, however, is this simply a play with incidental songs.

"This is not a show dealing with small ideas, so if (the songs) were incidental, they'd be out," Hamlisch said, over a salad at the Prado.

"When those songs take stage, they really take stage," added lyricist Craig Carnelia (who also worked with Hamlisch on "Sweet Smell of Success").

One song deals with Hellman's eloquent refusal to name names to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Carnelia's confrontational lyrics use fragments of the congressional inquisitors' language: Are you now / Have you ever / Give us names.

Initially, O'Brien wondered if the music would "usurp the show. But it doesn't," he said, "because the ferocity and the driven quality of these two women inevitably score and keep you going."

Ephron -- who has been described as "able to kill you at 50 paces with her wit" -- seems unlikely to be intimidated by anyone, but she admitted to having been nervous when she interviewed Hellman some 20 years ago.

"Before I met her, I was terrified of her, but she turned out not to be particularly intimidating but really quite a lot of fun," Ephron said.

McCarthy, whom she never met, still strikes her as a daunting figure, however. "She's such a spectacular writer and so jaw-droppingly vicious when she wants to be."

Ferocious, driven, vicious -- McCarthy and Hellman are the material of an author's dreams. "You're constantly grateful to them for having lived such rich, complicated lives," said Ephron, who, in her maiden voyage as a playwright, sounded like someone in the giddy first days of a love affair.

"There's this thing I'm always feeling with them, which is, am I dead and is this heaven?" she said of watching the cast bring her vision to life. "Yesterday, Harry did this dance ... and I just sat there thinking, what is better than this? What is more extraordinary than watching people like this create this thing?"

Janice Steinberg is a San Diego arts writer.

DATEBOOK: "Imaginary Friends"
8 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays, through Nov. 3
The Globe Theatres
Balboa Park, (619) 239-2255
$20-$50

Article reprinted w/o permission
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