Imaginary Friends by Nora Ephron Page B

This process did not seem to me to encourage play-writing, although for a while I thought about writing a play that took place at a table read at the Actors Studio and that included a character not unlike Harold Brodkey. In any case, after a while I stopped going to the Actors Studio and resigned myself to the possibility that my relationship with the theater would always and forever be as a member of the audience.
    But Lillian and Mary, a play? A cartoon lightbulb lit up in my head. Of course: a play. I knew where it took place, and I even knew the first line. I could imagine McCarthy and Hellman—not necessarily as friends but at least in conversation. I could write an entire scene about what happened at Sarah Lawrence, and turn it into a scene about how impossible it was to know what happened at Sarah Lawrence. I could write about a subject that has interested me since my days as a magazine journalist: women and what they do to each other. I could write about McCarthy’s love of the truth—which she turned into a religion—and about Hellman’s way with a story, which she turned into a pathology. I could do it, I hoped, without taking sides. (How could you take sides, after all? They were both wrong. And, at the same time, they were both right.) And I could perhaps end up with something that was not the truth, and not the story, but something else. To begin with, a play.

Imaginary Friends
was first produced at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, where it opened on September 29, 2002. The production then moved to the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, New York, where it was presented by USA Ostar Theatricals and opened on December 12, 2002, with the following cast:
    LILLIAN HELLMAN
Swoosie Kurtz
MARY MCCARTHY
Cherry Jones
THE MAN
Harry Groener
A WOMAN
Anne Pitoniak
ABBY KAISER & others
Anne Allgood
LEO & others
Bernard Dotson
MRS. STILLMAN & others
Rosena M. Hill
BEGUINE DANCER & others
Gina Lamparelli
FACT & others
Dirk Lumbard
FICTION & others
Peter Marx
VIC & others
Perry Ojeda
FIZZY & others
Karyn Quackenbush
Directed by
Jack O’Brien
Choreographed by
Jerry Mitchell
Music by
Marvin Hamlisch
Lyrics by
Craig Carnelia
Designed by
Michael Levine
Lighting by
Kenneth Posner

CHARACTERS
    Lillian Hellman
Mary McCarthy
Max Hellman
Fizzy
Uncle Myers
Dashiell Hammett
Edmund Wilson
Philip Rahv
James T. Farrell
Harold Taylor
Stephen Spender
Sarah Lawrence student
Black maid
Fact
Fiction
Dick Cavett
Paris Reporter
Abby Kaiser
Norman Mailer
Mary’s lawyer
Muriel Gardiner (A Woman)
    In the original production, one actor played the parts of Max Hellman, Uncle Myers, Dashiell Hammett, Edmund Wilson, Philip Rahv, James T Farrell, the black maid, Norman Mailer, and Mary’s lawyer.

ACT 1

Scene 1
    A bare stage
.
    We see two women smoking. They are
LILLIAN HELLMAN
and
MARY MCCARTHY .
They’re wearing suits and heels
.
    LILLIAN : Did we ever meet?
    MARY : Once or twice.
    LILLIAN : I don’t really remember.
    MARY : Well, then I don’t remember, either.
    LILLIAN : All right. Where was it?
    MARY : At Sarah Lawrence College. Stephen Spender invited us to speak—
    LILLIAN :
I
was invited. You turned up.
    MARY : You thought I was a student because I looked quite young.
    LILLIAN : I didn’t even notice you.
    MARY : My point. I walked onto the sunporch, and you were telling all of them a huge lie—
    LILLIAN : Naturally—
    MARY : —about the Spanish civil war. I couldn’t bear it. You were brainwashing them, and they were looking at you like wide-eyed converts. So I interrupted and corrected you. And we had a fight.
[To the audience.]
And I remember that on her bare arms, she had a great many bracelets, gold and silver—
    A long string with a hook on the end falls from the rafters with a bunch of gold and silver bracelets dangling from it
. LILLIAN
puts them on
.
    —and they began to tremble in her fury and surprise at being caught red-handed in a lie.
    LILLIAN
holds out her arm and makes the bracelets jangle against one another, louder