SAN DIEGO--There may be no business like show business, but neither is there any feud like a literary feud, and Nora Ephron, in writing her first play, has convincingly made one into the other.
"Imaginary Friends," her dramatization of the parallel and conflicting lives of Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy, is a feast of wit and language drawn from the words of her famous protagonists but smartly shaped into a serious comedy with music (a handful of songs by Marvin Hamlisch and Craig Carnelia) that grows into a hair-pulling duel even Don King could appreciate.
In this out-of-town opening that is headed to Broadway in December, Swoosie Kurtz plays the craggy, contentious playwright-memoirist Hellman, and Cherry Jones is the formidable lady who was McCarthy, the critic and novelist. The two stage veterans prove superb, embodying this pair of philosophically opposed American writers who barely knew each other until a simmering enmity between them boiled over into a public grudge match late in their lives. Their relentless parry and thrust are so brutally in sync that the two actresses will have to share any awards that come their way, as some surely will.
Ephron, screenwriter of "When Harry Met Sally ...," seizes upon the inciting incident of McCarthy's denouncing Hellman as a liar on "The Dick Cavett Show" in 1980 and works backward, filling in their biographies from a vantage point beyond the grave. As their individual life stories unfold on a stage often bare except for the backdrop of an enormous red curtain (suggesting that they didn't make it to heaven), the two wrestle with each another at every step down memory lane.
Recalling a more decorous time, Jones, as McCarthy, speaks with a lyrical precision that is a model of elocution, mincing Hellman with each carefully chosen syllable. But Kurtz, as the prepossessing author of the Broadway hits "The Children's Hour" and "Watch on the Rhine," gamely counterpunches with a cigarette-flavored growl that is wounding in its own way. They seem evenly matched--and would a dramatist have it any other way?
This battle of wits never took place, but it might have, Ephron suggests, much as Steve Martin imagined the meeting of Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein in his "Picasso at the Lapin Agile."
